Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists

James Lavadour - Walla Walla

wredstarresearchcenter — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 01:51:00 -0500

Phone Interview by Anastasia Mejia

Spring 2011

I had the privilege to interview self-taught painter James Lavadour. When viewing James Lavadour’s paintings for the first time I was immediately drawn to their expressive vibrant colors and the gestural abstract landscapes which are inspired by the Blue Mountains surrounding his home in Eastern Oregon. I’m away from my home in the Columbia River Gorge attending school at Portland State University. Seeing Jame’s paintings gives me a sense of the comfort, energy, and familiarity of my home terrain. James Lavadour doesn’t simply depict the land, he is constantly in a state of investigation asking questions and creating energy in the form of pouring, dripping, scraping, and layering paint. What blew me away about James in our interview was the pure excitement in his voice and the absolute passion and dedication he has for his art as well as his community on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. James Lavadour has been such an inspiration to me it was an honor to interview this profound and prolific artist.

The Interior, 2011, Oil on Wood

Geographies of the Same Stone: for TT 2, 2010, Oil on Panel

Blue Basalt, 2010, Oil on Panel

Silk, 2008, Oil on Panel

Transcribed Phone Interview

Anastasia Mejia: In a review from OregonLive about your solo show at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in 2008 the article talks about the influences of jazz music, Asian Art, and Abstract Expressionist painting in your work. I am interested to learn how these influences have weaved into your paintings? This article was written in 2008 have you acquired new sources of inspiration? If so what are they and how have they affected your work now?

James Lavadour: There is a certain thing that jazz, Chinese painting, abstract painting, Asian music, all have in common and that’s improvisational thinking. This institutionalizing sense of being able to jump out into the unknown and discover things. I’m a self-taught painter. That’s kind of the main skill of my artistic thinking is the improvisation of looking into things that I don’t know anything about or nobody has informed me of. I’m just discovering things and the properties and potentials of all the things I’ve discovered. Whether it be color or paint or composition or flow or any other process or process oriented way of thinking.

So when I began my personal body of work about ten years ago in 2000 I had ended another way of thinking prior to that. I think painting is a developmental thing. You go through all these different stages to become what you are and I was at a point where I couldn’t go any further doing what I was doing back in the nineties. I had to go back and reconsider everything, what it is I do, how I do it, and why and where it comes from. I kind of tie that into printmaking which printmaking taught me the discipline of visual analysis.

Tent, 2008, Oil on Panel

AM: You have lived and worked on the Umatilla Indian Reservation all your life. What made you decide to stay instead of moving to a city with an established art community like New York City or even Portland, Oregon?

JL: Well opportunity I guess! Life opportunities. I was born in Pendleton. I grew up my early years on the reservation and then my dad got a job in Walla Walla at the state penitentiary. We moved to Walla Walla for ten-fifteen years. I was a very poor student. I didn’t really fit in. I was a self-taught artist but there was nobody that I knew that actually considered that a way to make a living or anything like that. It was just like something you do, a hobby or something like that it wasn’t really a profession.

I had a family right out of high school. I had kids I had to get a job and painting is something that I always loved. I love to paint. I painted in the evening and on weekends any spare moment. I would paint on the kitchen table, a bedroom, you know that kind of thing.

It was just something I continued to do until one day I was approached. I did a lot of local things. I used to take paintings and put them in the local craft fair- spread out a blanket and have a bunch of little paintings and sell them to make some extra income. I met people that way and eventually got a show with the Oregon Arts Commission. They used to have a thing called Visual Arts Resources. Some local people around Pendleton brought me to their attention and they invited me to have an exhibition.

From there I met people at Sacred Circle Gallery in Seattle. That is really where I got my chops as far as being an artist out in the world. I got that from United Indian Small Tribes Sacred Circle Gallery and that gallery by the way, was sort of a hot bed for Native American artists. I met Edgar Heap of Birds, Joe Feddersen, Rick Bartow, Lillian Pitt, and Kay Walkingstick. It was a good place and they had shows all over. Native American artists were already organized they were having shows all over the country and in Europe-sort of a Native American art thing had been in full bloom. At that time when I was young I didn’t know the difference between a gallery and a museum, public space or whatever. I never encountered those things before.

AM: How old were you when you first were represented at Sacred Circle Gallery?

JL: When I was represented at Sacred Circle Gallery I was probably in my thirties. I had my fist exhibition at Sacred Circle Gallery and I thought, “Wow I sold a painting.” I think I sold my first painting there to Gail Tremblay it was as much as I had made in a month. I thought, “Oh my god I’m going to be able to do this for a living.” Only when I talked to my gallery director he said, “Oh, most people make it in about 20 years.” I almost cried, “Oh my god, twenty years, I can’t hang on 20 years!”

Yellow Top, 2008, Oil on Panel

Bank, 2008, Oil on Panel

AM: Would you consider any of your works to be an expression of your identity in relation to the landscape in which you’ve spent your whole life? Do you feel like your paintings tell a story of the land and your place within it?

JL: Well that’s a romantic question and in a romantic way, yes. But I think there’s more to it, like I’ve said, I’ve come to understand something about painting; that is existence, who I am, where we are, all of us together universally.

AM: Art has obviously had an enormous impact on your life. I learned that you co-founded the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on your reservation with the goal of using art to transform the community within the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Could you tell me about the program, how it came to be, and how it’s doing today?

JL: There’s a lot of arts and artists on my small reservation. There must be maybe 3,000 people in just my generation at least 20 artists have been down to IAIA. That’s not counting the people who just make stuff all the time so it’s a very rich, deep, aesthetic, in any Native community. It’s one of the common characteristics of Native communities. But there’s no services, there’s no infrastructure for full support, like art commissions or grants, or access to things.

My community is really big on community service. I’ve worked for my tribe for about fifteen years. I’ve done education and natural resources, economic developments, and served on commissions. It’s sort of expected in a small community like this. If you know how to do something you have to participate in the community, you have to serve on something. You can either run for a board or serve on a commission like natural resources, health and education, whatever it may be. That’s how the whole tribal development happens from all that participation. It’s all taken a lot of work by everybody to make things grow. Plus, service is primary in the Native community, veterans, public service, and that kind of thing is such a rich and deep and powerful commonality. You see other people do stuff and you want to do it too.

Me being sort of a bad student and not having a lot of skills I thought, “why not art?” There’s artists who need studio space, access to technology, the support to travel, funding for projects, networking, and they need opportunities out in the world. They need somebody to knock on some doors and invite them out off of the rez so they can get higher education. I was talking to another artist Phillip Minthorn who is a really spectacular painter about creating such a program (Crow’s Shadow Institute, Crow Shadow was the title of a painting of mine that I did).

At the time I was working for the Tribal Community Economic Development Program and Phillip and I got together and talked about Crow’s Shadow. He has been down to Tamarind Institute to make prints and I had been to Rutgers University to make prints and we both thought printmaking was really a fantastic thing. There’s so much possibilities in printmaking and we could create a tribal reservation based studio that could serve a lot of different functions. It could bring in resources, it could plug people into what’s going on, it could provide access to new technologies for artists who have not necessarily been to college. It just seemed like a natural thing but of course starting a non-profit organization is a story in itself and it’s very difficult. It took a lot of people not just me. I was just sort of the one who ran off my mouth all the time about what a great thing this was. It took people to help us do the organizational development and raise money. It became a 501(c)(3) independent of the tribe itself.

Deep Moon, 2004, Oil on Panel

Flare, 2002, Oil on Panel

AM: Labels such as Native artist and Northwest artist have been used to define you and your work. In 2009, you were on OPB’s program Think Out Loud talking about the future of Native Arts and you were asked to define yourself. You choose to define yourself as a “painter. Period.” Why do you feel so strongly about this title and choose not to call yourself a Native Artist or your work Native art?

JL: Saying Native American Artists which I am a Native person. I am enrolled but you could not spot me in a crowd. I live on my reservation. I have my own history within the reservation and community. Native American Artists and the Native American Art world exists somewhere out there somewhere off the reservation. I mean there’s people who do cultural things; beadwork and that type of thing. There are people who are involved in the so-called Native American Art movement and I felt, “where do I fit in to all that and what is that all about?”

Basically it was just people helping other people to get out in the world, grab a space out there, break down some barriers, go do your thing, and provide some opportunities for somebody else. That was really one of the wonderful characteristics of the Native American Art community. They were very diverse in what they do and yet they were very connected to one another and they provided opportunities, opened doors, spread peoples names around, recommended people, sat on commissions nation wide, and helped one another.

That was one of the great things but there was always that question, what is Native American art? There’s all these theme things arising from tradition…you pick up any resume and you come up with a zillion different ideas but for me I was never really interested in canned Indianism. I am interested in my community. I am interested in my community arising from poverty and being able to find its place in the world. Arising out of some social-political-economic obscurity, because I believe in my community.

Like I told you before, art is going through the very stages for me. My art is focused on something big, universal, some big event that is happening beyond my personal identity. The world is happening outside of me and my identity which has nothing to do with it. I’m just eyes and ears, I feel, I see, I want to know, and I’m curious. At that level I guess I realize that there’s no Native American Scientists or Native American Technologists. There is just science, technology, mathematics, it’s the human reflective faculty reaching out into the world trying to understand what it is and who it is we are by bringing back stuff that’s useful for everyone. Those things, Northwest artists, even contemporary artists, those are things that are used in institutional categorizations to be able to fit all these diverse things that are going on. When I get up in the morning and I look into paint I’m thinking, “wow, I’ve never seen that before!” It makes me feel, it moves me, it wakes me up!

River (7), 2007, Oil on Panel

Under Fire, 2008, Oil on Panel

Blue House, 2008, Oil on Panel

AM: You have been a painter for a long time. I’m interested about the progression of your paintings and the different stages that your work has gone through. Could you elaborate on those progressions?

JL: I’m self-taught. I look at everything, I go to libraries and I look at paintings in galleries but I never have all that much access to real artwork living in a rural place except magazines and the libraries. Ever since I was a child I had certain kinds of perceptual games. My mother made paintings and everybody in my family did something. My mother painted cartoons, my grandmother did things, people did beadwork, I had an uncle that was a country western musician. I had an uncle that was just like a genius mechanic he could fashion stuff together to make something.

People were doing things and that part of their brain was always a part of family life in a certain sense. Being able to make things and do things in the world. One of the things I do is look into “stuff.” I see layers, motions, undercurrents, and I am curious about the way things are put together. I could look at stains on a wall and see space inside those stains. That is sort of the basis of my whole aesthetic process to instigate events and then look into them and discover things.

I used to hike a lot and I realized that the big patterns of the mountains and the drainages were identical to the patterns in a mud puddle. The way water evaporates and contracts, and leaves all these traces of little canyons and river rings only microcosms. That really affected me, that kind of discovery. That led to the next thing where I was taking paint and throwing it out on paper and swirling it around and causing erosions, not mountains but just erosion on a piece of paper. When I sat down and looked at it I could just cut the top off and there was a perfect landscape.

In the beginning I realized that everything out there that I was looking at was inside me and then I started thinking that what’s inside me must be out there. So I started looking at the world in a very familiar way. I started to recognize stuff.

I didn’t know how a painting was made and that’s how I started by simply throwing pigment out there and swirling it around and seeing patterns and how to manipulate those patterns, erosion marks, drips, stains, and then look at them and see stuff in there. I realized there’s this big connection between my imagination or- it’s not really an imagination, that certain things, visual things, stimulate reflective process of reflection and memory. To me it’s like a cascade of memories. You look at something and it says, “Oh, I remember your brain tries to make sense out of this abstract thing,” and then all of a sudden boom, there’s an image in your brain. The image is not necessarily in the paint; it’s in something that you’re providing. That phenomena really interested me and it ended up being an extraordinary thing.

I just make marks, scrapes, and dimensional mass. I went through a period of just painting the top white. There’s all these ins and outs and all this contrasts and movement and layers and all this kind of stuff that spoke of mass dimension. I spent years just looking and studying and doing that. Finally I began to realize I could structure this stuff. I structured it by remembering what’s happening by walking, by thinking, going up and going down a hillside.

I had ten feet long stick of a rose bush. I let it dry, it was like a fishing pole kind of thing but when I shake it with my fist the pole itself starts moving and I hold my fist still and all of a sudden the pole is moving and I can feel the kinetic energy of that force. I realized that’s really what painting is really all about finding those hidden forces. Finding that thing that looks like it’s a static stick but it contains this great energy. Painting became this process of investigation and asking questions and tipping off events by tipping, pouring, scraping, wiping, and a zillion things began to happen.

Dreaming of Whirlwinds, 1995, Print

AM: Did printmaking also change the way you paint currently now?

JL: Printmaking was the most painful thing that I had ever done. As you can tell I’m just sort of like everything is just going out all at once and printmaking required me to think about one thing at a time and how to stack that on top of another thing. So I had to analyze what it is that I am doing in stages, and I had never done that before. I had just thought of point A to point Z is a very complicated journey. I didn’t realize that you could divide it up into parts and that became like the mature stage of what I’m doing now. When I was able to analyze my process and divide it all into stages, color stages, compositional stages, stack all these different individual singular layers which are individual paintings in themselves on top of one another to create these deep and emotional, and compelling things to look at. Printmaking, as a discipline is very old but it’s very rigid, this is the way you do it, you have yellow, you have blue, you have red, and then you have these secondary and tertiary colors and as you lay them up you build up your images. One of the things I wanted more than anything else was this great great depth in painting, it’s like standing on top of a mountain, I want to see dimension I want to see the world I want to see something way back there. Like looking through a telescope, I wanted to know what’s way way way way way back there. Before when I was working in a single stage things flattened out into one surface, so you couldn’t see that depth. It wasn’t until printmaking that I began to realize how to build those things up and get that thing, which is what I’m doing right now. It’s something good to look at though; I mean that’s my whole goal. I am trying to make good things to look at, period.

Mars, 2005, Oil on Panel

Ice, 2007, Oil on Panel

AM: When you’re working in your studio, what are your habits? What would a typical workday look like? In an interview on KBOO Community radio in 2010 you said that you wake up at 3:00 am in the morning and head to your studio. You called it “first energy.” Could you talk about this idea of “first energy” and how this affects your studio practice?

JL: I’m at a stage in my paintings where I’m in the longest creative period I’ve ever been in my life. It’s been going on for about 11 or 12 years. This stuff is happening all the time, your not just trying to reach a particular state, you’re going by like driving through the country, you’re going by stuff at a break-neck speed, stuff is happening all the time. It requires, and I realize it’s all about energy it’s not about my imagination, it’s not about portraying something or depicting, or expressing or saying something, or encoding something, it’s not about any of that. It’s about the world that’s happening right outside, right in front of your eyes. Just like we think there’s clear space but in that space there are particles and movements and all kinds of stuff going on, our reality is very very very complex. There’s so much stuff going on I realize it’s the mundane things of life that prevent us from seeing it.

You have a couple of telephone calls and I’m my mother’s caretaker and I have to take her to the doctor’s office and just all the stuff that happens during the day. After doing all of that stuff is not the time to paint, it’s before all that stuff happens. It’s like, I’ve been asleep I get right up out of bed, I’m sort of an insomniac so I just capitalize on the fact that I couldn’t sleep. I started getting up at 3 o’clock and I realized that I have this sense of excitement and there’s nobody that has any expectations and it was like looking into a shining light into a dark space. You know, it’s exciting and I realized that getting out of bed and looking at color I love that, I just love it! To be able to pursue beauty, I mean just for the pleasure of pursuing beauty, look for it, search for it, scrape for it, dig for it, requires energy, and it requires an undistracted, opened heart and mind. That is the only time I have that I don’t talk to anybody and I’m by myself, and there it is, it’s one of our basic human capacities. Sometimes it’s just for a moment. It’s like a flash, like something that is just kind of gone and sometimes it lingers for awhile. Sometimes it lingers for an hour or maybe two or three hours but something always extinguishes it because it’s a delicate delicate arrangement of psychological, mental, memory, emotion, and recognition, of this great, wonderful thing that’s happening. It has become a very productive time for me like I said, this is the most productive time of my life, it works. I get up in the morning and I work. If I can get three, four hours in I’m doing good. I have the goal of doing one thing; I can do one thing every day. Sometimes I can do sixteen, twenty different things, work on twenty different paintings in a day, but if I can do one, make one, inadvertent mark. I’m not making intentional marks, I’m not expressing my understanding of the land, I’m not depicting the land. What I’m doing is taking paint laying it down and maybe take a 16 inch scraper and just “swoosh” and paint goes all over the place, it flies and contrast happens and what was underneath, you see it in a new way it’s coming out in and it looks like it had a new layer on top of it, something else is starting to happen. That stimulates this whole process that those things are not intentional, they’re inadvertent it’s like the first time you touch it, a painting with a color or you make a mark or a scrape that’s a powerful thing, powerful because it comes from the great beyond, it comes from what is happening, the flow of things, its a cosmic event, like gravity is a cosmic event. The more you work at it the more you muddy that up.

Foot Hills, 2007, Oil on Panel

River (11), 2007, Oil on Panel

AM: I read in an interview with Eva Lake in 2005 that you are constantly working on multiple pieces and genres rather than painting from start to finish. You have paintings that you have been working on since 2000. Why do you enjoy working this way?

JL: Well it’s like I said, in 2000 was the very significant time, I realized at various stages, what I was doing I could break it down into parts and stages. What I realized is that it made me extremely productive because I did not have to worry about what something looked like or even what it meant, or what color I was using. I didn’t have to do that. All I had to do was stand and make a mark and then make another mark and then take another painting and make another mark. Then over time when I ran out of materials I began to go back over the ones I had already made. I approached it the same way and they began to get complex, and as I made a mark upon mark upon mark, as we talked before, a certain kind of mass begins to develop. This dimensional mass and it’s characteristics are all of your body movements, all the slashes, all the marks, all the lines, all the undulations, all the twists and turns of your hand, those are what make up the dimensional mass. As the mass begins to build there are recognizable forms in there, landscape forms for me. It becomes compositional to the point where you create a space that can be inhabited through, perceptually inhabited. You got background, foreground, middle ground, ups and downs, flow, interior, space, feeling, dimension, those are not things you can just sit out, or I cannot just embark on and do in one place because those take time. It takes experience, it takes day after day for that to build up, but if you’re working on a hundred paintings a lot builds up. So if I’m working at any given time, 50 paintings, and working on each one a little bit everyday or bring new ones out and working on them this whole body of work starts to develop. You begin to see patterns through the whole thing it’s not just… You see color, patterns of the way you make marks, patterns and that, the way you structure things. One of the things I discover was that I wasn’t making landscapes, I was making a vortex. Every single painting was a vortex, sometimes it’s stretched out or compressed or elongated or broken up into smaller vortices but it’s all that type of action and it’s what flow is all about. Flow, material flows, river, water, air, dirt until it meets an obstruction and when it meets an obstruction it breaks apart right there and as it breaks apart it makes a vortex on each side. That is called a cosmic vortex; I mean that’s a formal name for it and it’s part of the whole science of flow.

Blanket, 2005, Oil on Panel

AM: Could you explain your use of individual panels to create a larger single piece such as “Blanket?” Do these smaller individual panels represent different ways in which you respond to the same landscape? What is your intention with the use of multiple panels?

JL: It’s all part of the same body of work; I’m working on 50 paintings. I am applying multiple colors. I might go yellow on some of them and that’s it. I might apply red on 5 or 6 and then violet on another 5 or 6. I look at the violet and I put yellow on top of that and I look at the red and I might put green on top of those. There all part of the same body of work. In fact it’s really all the same painting so there are different aspects of one point in time. A thing that I’m doing in that time, a way that I’m behaving, a way that I’m composing, colors that I’m using, all that kind of stuff. So they’re not different responses, what I do is I go through all those things and I edit them. If you look at those things there’s sort of a geometry to them, you’ve got warm against cool, and then you’ve got zig against zag, in terms of composition. Where one horizon goes up the following horizons go down and they just contrast one another. So there’s a sense of larger compositions making compositions out of the things that I’ve already made, like composing a poem. Yes, they all fit together somehow, all these various elements do fit together in this greater thing and that’s really what gave me the rational to start combining individual panels together. I realized that like poetry, you put one against the other and they enhance one another and they do something larger, the individual pieces do.

AM: What happens to the paintings that you don’t use for the combined works?

JL: Well, I’m still working on them, they’re still right here. I’ve been working on them today from that period, from 2005. I have continued to work on certain panels and there still developing in new ways.

Blast, 2008, Oil on Panel

AM: What draws me to your paintings is your use of colors which gives each painting an energy and vibrancy. How do you decide what colors you’re going to use when you’re working on a piece? Do you start a painting or a series of paintings with a particular color or colors in mind?

JL: I used to, when I worked monochromatically. That’s when I was just kind of understanding what paint did on a surface, the way it piled up and stretched, and bled all that kind of stuff. You only have red/yellow/blue that’s it, and each red/yellow/blue has it’s own spectrum to it, warm or cool. If you start off anywhere, just like throwing a dart at the color wheel doesn’t matter, start off with red, start off with yellow, start off with a blue. The next step is what contrasts with that, what shows on top of that and usually it’s one of the other colors. Like a blue, maybe an orange, if you’ve got an orange up there maybe it’s a violet, if you’ve got a red up there maybe a green or an orange. The decisions start to come in the process, in the process of painting, not in the projection of my emotional wants or needs. I feel when I look at something red, it makes me feel a certain way, and that’s indescribable. If I keep it simple, red yellow blue and I’m working with something that has red I know that what’s going to show up on top of that will be some other-there’s something that shows up on top of that very clearly and crisply. Color has never really been all that interesting to me it’s a necessary thing; it’s not what has caused me to ask my big questions.

Cache, 2007, Oil on Panel

AM: How do you decide when your paintings are “done” or completed as far as you can take them? Do you feel like you are ever fully resolved with a painting?

JL: Well no, as we talked about my body of work it is still in play for the last 10 years. I’m still working on these paintings. I do go through various places like I have arrived at a certain place where something particular is going on like “Blanket.” I haven’t been back there and I’m glad I singled those paintings out to be together because I would’ve painted on them again. They would be entirely different today. The blues would’ve been reds and whatever. At any given time in the process there are distinctive images that are happening and I save those, that’s what I use for exhibiting. It’s like taking a fruit off of a tree during a particular season. If I hang on to those things I definitely would work on them again.

Pull of Gravity, 2011, Oil on Wood

AM: What are you currently working on?

JL: Well, I have currently gotten a stack of boxes. They are torsion boxes, they’re like a hollow door made out of very light baltic birch and about 2 inches thick. I’ve got two different sizes, 18” x 24” and then 32” x 48”. I had the boxes gessoed for me in a very specific way so the surfaces are smooth as glass.

What I’m doing is about the properties of paint and displaying the properties of paint. These are the most explicit surfaces I’ve ever worked on because every nuance every little mark or touch, or brush mark, or drip, or scrape, or whatever, shows up. It’s been really exciting to have something so extremely responsive and explicit to the event. Some surfaces, if they’re rough they negate a lot of the effort of when you apply paint. Canvas is like a photograph, its always a little bit out of focus for me but these things are like a digital camera that is in extreme focus so you can see all the properties of the events of each layer of paint. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m working on these boxes and kind of going crazy, its been a winter’s worth of work. When you’re a painter you live in a cave, I come out every once and a while to blink at the sun and think about other things other than all this stuff.

Artist Résumé:

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2010

“Geographies of the Same Stone (for TT),” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

2009

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle,WA

2008

“Close to the Ground,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

“The Properties of Paint,” Hallie Ford Museum, Willamette University, Salem, OR

2006

“Sun Spots,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

“Rain,” Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN

“Magic Valley,” Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID

2005

Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle, WA

“Walk,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

2004

Cumberland Gallery, Nashville, TN

2003

“Romantic Landscape,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

“New Camp,” Grover Thurston, Seattle, WA

Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID

2002

“Intersections II,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

“Intersections,” Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, WA

2001

Retrospective, Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle, WA

2000

“Abstracts,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland,OR

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle, WA

1999

“Abstracts,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle, WA

1998

PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

Sacred Circle Gallery, Seattle, WA

Philip Feldman Gallery, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR

1997

PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle, WA

1995

Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

1993

Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA

1992

Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

Wentz Gallery, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR

1991

Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona

1990

Cliff Michel Gallery, Portland, OR

Portland Art Museum, OR

Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

Boise Art Museum, ID

1988

Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

1986

C.N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis

Carnegie Center for the Arts, Walla Walla, WA

1984

Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR

Sacred Circle Gallery, Seattle, WA

1983

Sacred Circle Gallery, Seattle, WA

1982

Oregon State Governors Office, Salem, OR

Visual Arts Resources/Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR

Landscapes and Interiors: James Lavadour (traveled)

1981

Visual Arts Resources, Museum of Art, Eugene, OR

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2010

“Vantage Point: The Contemporary Native Art Collection,” Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC (Sept. 25 2010 - Aug. 7, 2011)

2009

“Catch-All,” PDX Summer Group Show, PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

2007

“Off-the-Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination,” Smithsonian Institute National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY (catalogue)

“18 Painters,” Mt. Hood Community College, Gresham, OR

2005

“Into the Fray: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art,” Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN

“Next,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

“Site Unseen: A Contemporary Look at Landscape,” Savannah Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA

“A Sense of Place: Selections from the Tacoma Art Museum Collection,” Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA

“New Tradition,” Archer Gallery, Clark College, Vancouver, WA

“Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture,” Art Train USA, Ann Arbor, MI (traveling USA by rail)

2004

“Wood Work,” J.G. Contemporary, New York, NY

“Seattle Perspective,” Seattle Convention Center, City of Seattle Portable Works Collection, Seattle, WA

“The Grand View: Brierstadt to Brophy,” Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA

Clatsop Community College, Astoria, OR

2003

“2003 Oregon Biennial,” Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

“Extreme Landscape,” Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ

“Earth, Wind, Fire and Water,” Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID

“Selections from the Elwood Collection,” Archer Gallery, Clark College, Vancouver, WA

“Northwest Masters,” City Space, City of Seattle Portable Works Collection, Seattle, WA

2001

“The Beta Press Collection: A Decade in the Northwest,” Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA

“Indian Time Millennial Project,” Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe, NM

“From Benton to Bartlet: Recent Acquisitions,” Washington State University Museum of Art, Pullman, WA

2000

“Physical Manifestations,” PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

1999

Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA

1998

“Contemplating Eternity,” Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA

“Redefining Tradition: First Nations Artists and Their Work,” Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA

“Gathered Into Earth: Contemporary Landscape Painting,” Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA

Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

“THE LABYRINTH: Visions and Interpretations of the Eternal Myth in Contemporary Art,” 2nd International Triennial of Graphic Art Inter-Kontakt-Grafik Prague â€˜98, Czech Republic

“Twentieth Anniversary of the Betty Bowen Artist Award,” Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, WA

“A Common Thread,” Gail Severn Gallery, Sun Valley, ID

1997

“Rising from Tradition,” The High Desert Museum, Bend, OR

1996-98

“Rediscovering the landscape of the Americas, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (traveled): Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX; Western Art Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC.

1996

“Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century,” The Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona (traveled to New Zealand): Museum of New Zealand, Wellington; Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganni; Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland; Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch; Wailato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton.

“Romance of the Land: Native Northwest Visions,” The Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA

“Twenty-five American Print Artists: La Jeune Gravure,” Mairie du Sixieme Arrondissement de Paris, France

“Native Papers: Joe Fedderson, James Lavadour, Kay Walkingstick, Phil Young,” Gallery 210, University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO

Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID

1995

Grover/Thurston Gallery, Seattle, WA

1994

“From The Earth X,” American Indian Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA

1993

“The Sacred and the Profane,” Jan Baum gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“1993 Biennial,” Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

1992

“Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada,” Ottawa. (traveled): Mackenzie Art gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada; The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

The Print Club, Philadelphia, PA

“Crossing Over/Changing Places: Artists and Collaborators,” (traveled): Anderson Gallery, Virginian Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Center on Contemporary Art (COCA), Seattle, WA

“Decolonizing of the Mind,” Center on Contemporary Art (COCA), Seattle, WA

“The Betty Bowen Legacy: Fourteen Years of Award Winning Art,” Security Pacific Gallery, Seattle, WA

“MASTER PRINTS from the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking: The First Five Years,” The Gallery at Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Princeton, NJ

1991

“Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century, The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; (traveled): The Eirejorg Museum of American History and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN; The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of the American History and Art, Tulsa,OK; The Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; The National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, The Customs House, New York, NY

“Northwest Tales: Contemporary Narrative Painting,” Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, AK

1990

“The Undiminished Landscape,” Security Pacific Corp. Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Museum of the Desert, Palm Springs, CA NORTHWEST x SOUTHWEST: PAINTED FICTIONS (traveled): Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, MT; Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA; Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, Houston, TX.

“Celebrated Selections,” The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ

“Tradition and Spirit: Contemporary Native American Art,” Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, WA

Windhorse Gallery, Seattle, WA

“Printed in America,” Walters Hall Gallery, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ

1989

“Roll on Columbia: Historic and Contemporary Landscapes of the Columbia River Gorge,” Maryhill Museum, Goldendale, WA Gorge

“Figurative Show,” Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

1988

“Crossed Cultures: Five Contemporary Native Northwest Artists,” Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA

“Artists of the Blue Mountains: 1910-1988, Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA

“Non-Objective Landscape,” Marylhurst College, Marylhurst, OR

1987

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA

“Recent Generations: Native American Art 1910 - 1987,” The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ

“New Directions Northwest: Contemporary Native American Art,” Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

“Beyond Blue Mountains: A Travelling Collection of Contemporary Native American Artworks,” Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia, WA

“Contemporary Visions: Fifteen Native American Artists,” Read/Stremmel Gallery, San Antonio, TX

“Native American Art: Our Contemporary Visions,” Stremmel Galleries, Reno, NV

1986

“The Artist Interprets the Landscape,” Blackfish Gallery, Portland, OR

“Oregon Artist Exhibition,” Oregon Pavilion, Expo ‘86, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

“Art of Eastern Oregon on Tour,” Eastern Oregon State College, La Grande, OR: (traveled)Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA

“Oregon Artist’s Show,” Sacred Circle Gallery, Seattle, WA Oregon Artists Show

1984

“Seattle Urban League: Minority Artist Show,” Seattle Center House, Seattle, WA

“No Beads No Trinkets: An Exhibition of Contemporary American Indian Artists, Palais de Nations, Geneva, Switzerland

Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR

“Contemporary Native American Art,” Touchstone Gallery, Spokane, WA

“Innovations: New Expression in Native American Painting,” The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ

1983

“1983 Oregon Biennial, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

“Indian Artists of the 1980’s,” Sacred Circle Gallery, Seattle, WA

SELECTED CATALOGS AND BOOKS

2001

Helper, Vicki. “James Lavadour: Landscapes.” Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, Spokane, WA.

1997

1996

Zevitas, Steven T. “New American Paintings: a quarterly exhibition.” Open Studios Press, vol. 1, No. VI. Boston, MA. Spring.

1995

Allen, Lois. “Contemporary Art in the North West.” Craftsman House G + B Arts International.

1994

Spanbauer, Tom. “L’homme qui tomba amourux de la lune/The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon,” cover. Editions Stock pour la traduction francaise.

Sayre, Henry M. “A World of Art.” Prentice-Hall Inc., a Simon & Schuster Co.

Penney, David and George Longfish. “Native American Art.” Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc.

1992

Brodsky, Judith. “Master Prints from the Rutgers Center for Creative Printmaking: The First 5 Years.” The Gallery at Bristol-Meyers Squibb: Princeton, NJ.

Nemelroff, Diane. “Land, Sprit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada.” National Gallery of Canada: Ottawa, CANADA.

Farmer, Jane and Charlotte Townsend-Gault. “Crossing Over/Changing Places: An Exhibition of Collaborative Print Projects and Paperworks. The Print Club: Philadelphia, PA.

Rynd, Chase W. “The Betty Bowen Legacy: Fourteen Years of Award-Winning Art.” Security Pacific Gallery: Seattle, WA.

1991

Archurlera, Margaret. “Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the 20th Century/

The Heard Museum: Phoenix, Arizona.

1990:

Chelette, Iona et al. “NORTHWEST X SOUTHWEST: PAINTED FICTIONS.” Palm Springs Desert Museum: Palm Springs, CA.

Evens, Linda E. “The Undiminished Landscape.” Security Pacific Gallery: San Francisco, CA.

Roberts, Prudence. “Northwest Viewpoints: James Lavadour.” Portland Art Museum: Portland, OR.

1989

Sims, Patterson. “Crossed Cultures: Five Contemporary Native Northwest Artists. Seattle Art Museum: Seattle, WA.

1987

Longfish, George et al. “New Directions Northwest.” Portland Art Museum: Portland: OR.

SELECTED AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS & COMMISSIONS

2005

Artist Fellowship, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN

Commission, Ashforth Pacific Inc., Portland, OR

2004

Award for Visual Arts, Flintridge Foundation, Pasadena, CA

2002

Oregon Arts Commission, North Mall Office Building, Salem, OR

1999

Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters, Eastern Oregon University

Public Art Project. Washington State Football/Soccer Stadium and Exhibition Center Project, Seattle, WA

1998

1998 Joan Mitchell Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, NY

1994

1994 Oregon Governor’s Arts Award, Oregon Arts Commission, Salem, OR

1991

Betty Bowen Memorial Recognition Award, Seattle Art Museum, Washington

1990

Fellowship to the Rutgers Center for the Innovative Print Making Rutgers, The University of New Jersey, New Brunswick,1989

1989

Northwest Major Works Award, Seattle Arts Commission, Washington

1987

Art in Public Places, Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia, WA

1986

Oregon Arts Fellowship, Oregon Arts Commission, Salem, OR

1985

Art in Public Places, Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia, WA

Pendleton Arts Council, OR, Artist Advocate Project (sponsored to paint for one year)

1983

Art in Public places, Seattle Arts Commission, Seattle, WA

1982

Public Art Project. Washington State Arts Commission. Olympia, WA

1981

Artist in Schools Program, Eastern Oregon Regional Art Council, La Grande, OR

1980

Artist in Residence, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Pendleton, Oregon

COLLECTIONS

Bank of America Corporation, San Francisco, CA

Boise Art Museum, Idaho

Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, WA

Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian reservation, Pendleton, OR

Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN

Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco, CA

Frank Russell & Company, Tacoma, WA

Gilkey Print Center, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

Hallie Ford Museum, Salem, OR

Heathman Management Corporation, Portland, OR

The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ

The Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Hilton Corporation, Portland, OR

Jane Voorhess Zimmerlie Museum, New Brunswick, NJ

MicroSoft Corporation, Redmond, WA

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ

Oregon Health and Sciences University, Portland, OR

Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR

Pacific Northwest Bell Corporation, Seattle, WA

Perkins Coie, Seattle, WA

Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portable Works Collection, Multnomah County, Oregon

Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

Seattle Arts Commission, Washington

Seattle Art Museum, Washington

Seattle Seahawks Stadium

Tacoma Art Museum, Washington

Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia

Western Heritage Savings and Loan, Pendleton, OR

West One Bank Corporation, Portland, OR

University of Oregon Library, Eugene, OR

University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, WA

U.S. Department of Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Washington D.C.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2010

Logue, Susan. “Exhibit Explores Modern Native American Art.” VOANews.com, November 2010.

Row, D.K. “Review: Gabriel Liston at New American Art Union and James Lavadour at PDX Contemporary Art.” The Oregonian, April 29.

Melrod, George. “Eden is Burning.” Art Ltd, March/April 2010.

Andrews, Scott. “Without Reservation.” Art Ltd, March/April 2010.

2008

Row, D.K. “Art Review: James Lavadour at Hallie Ford.” The Oregonian, January 30.

Douglass, Arcy. “Between Heaven and Earth: The Work of James Lavadour.” First Thursday Picks, PORT, March 31.

Cowan, Ron. “Artistic Cataclysm:Exhibit at Hallie Ford Showcases the Talent of Painter James Lavadour.” Statesman Journal, February 10.

Murry, Terry. “Letting the Paint Speak,” The East Oregonian, February 10.

2007

Silver, Laura. “Putting native artists on the map.” downtown express, vol. 20, no. 9, July 13-19.

Baker, R.C. “Numbers by Painting,” Best in Show, Village Voice, June 6-12.

Glueck, Grace. “Lands You Can’t See in a Guidebook.” The New York Times, March 23.

Fogarty, Mark. “Landscapes of the imagination featured in new exhibit.” Indian Country Today, March 14.

2006

Bovee, Katherine. “James and Joey Lavadour at PDX,” PORT, September 2.

Motley, John. “James Lavadour.” Portland Mercury, Aug. 31 - Sept. 6.

Row, David. “Master of the picturesque.” A & E, The Oregonian, August 25=.

Jahn, Jeff. “What to see?” PORT, August.

2005

Farr, Sheila. “Desolation, transformation: James Lavadour’s landscapes of the mind.” The Seattle Times, Sept. 16.

Lake, Eva. “The Event of Painting: an Interview with James Lavadour.” KBOO, April 21.

Row, D.K. “High Voltage Theatrics.” The Oregonian, April.

Dirks, Ryan. “Visual Arts.” Portland Mercury, March 17.

Row, D.K. “A&E Shows of Note.” The Oregonian, Friday March 4.

“Portland Life.” Portland Tribune, March 1.

2004

O’Scannlain, Gerry Stroph. “James Lavadour: A Man In Love With Paint.” Open Spaces, August 14.

Row, D.K. “James Lavadour.” The Oregonian, July 23.

Row, D.K. “Painting like jazz.” The Oregonian, January 2.

Jahn, Jeff. “Critical i.” the nw drizzle, January.

2003

Van Dongen, Susan. “An Exhibit at the Printmaking Council Captures Native American Imagery and Mythology.” PacketOnline, October 11.

Genocchio, Benjamin. “Landscapes That Push The Boundaries.” The New York Times. Sunday, September 14.

Farr, Sheila. “Lavadour’s landscapes move into new territory.” The Seattle Times, September 12.

Wagonfield, Judy. “Lavadour’s earth grows vibrantly with energy and spirit.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 12.

Speer, Richard. “Bi-Furious.” Willamette Week, July 2.

Taylor, Sue. “James Lavadour at Maryhill Museum of Art and PDX.” Art in America, April.

Baker, Kenneth. “Mass Appeal: S.F. International Art Fair.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 18.

2002

Atiyeh, Meagan. “Art Reviews.” The Organ, Vol. 1, Issue 2, November/December.

“WW Pick.” Willamette Week, September 4.

Rushing, Jackson W. “What the Ground Says: The Art of James Lavadour.” Art Journal.

2000

Row, D.K. “Lavadour on Lavadour.” The Oregonian, November 9.

Gibson, Daniel. “James Lavadour, Alchemist of Light.” Native Peoples Arts & Lifeways vol. XIII, Sept/Oct.

“Artist of Change: James Lavadour.” Native Peoples Magazine, April/May.

1999

Duford, Daniel. “The Deep Interior.” Willamette Week, August 1999

1998

Row, D.K. “The lay of his land.” The Oregonian, September.

Cohn, Terri. “Conquistadors of the Void.” Artweek, April.

1997

Gragg, Randy. “Ascending past regionalism.” The Oregonian, September.

Row, D.K. “Native Fire.” Willamette Week, October.

Smith, Tracy. “James Lavadour at PDX.” Art in America, March.

Updike, Robin. “Galleries: From Landscapes, Artistic Inspiration.” The Seattle Times, Feb. 18.

Parr, Debra. “Reviews: Native Paper: Gallery 210, University of Missouri.” New Art Examiner, Vol. 24, No. 8, May.

“Selected Works of Famous American Printmakers.” Chinese Printmaking Magazine. No. 12, ISSN 1005-0787.

1995

Chambers, Lori. “Lasting Impressions.” Rutgers Magazine, vol. 75, no. 5, Spring

1994

Roberts, Prudence. “Profile: James Lavadour.” VISIONS, Summer.

1993

Watson, Scott. “Whose Nation?” Canadian Art, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring.

“Contingent Histories, Aesthetic Politics.” New Art Examiner, vol. 20, no. 7, March.

Fiedler, Nadine. “Spirit Negatives: James Lavadour at Wentz Gallery, PNCA/Elizabeth Leach Gallery.” Reflex, vol. 7, no. 1, January/February.

1992

“Grounded in Oregon: Nature and Culture as the Local Ethnology in Portland.” VISIONS, vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 30-32, Spring.

“Crow’s Shadow, a Foundation for Art at the Umatilla Reservation.” Artweek, vol. 23, no. 22, August 20.

Nixon, Bruce. “Contemporary Landscape Painting.” Artweek, vol. 23, no. 23, Sept. 3.

Strickland, Rennard. “Shared Visions - Part III.” Native Peoples Magazine, vol. 5, no. 2, Winter.

Jackson, Rushing W. “Recent Native American Art.” Art Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, fall.

1991

Whittemore, L.I. “On Home Ground.” The Oregonian, August 16.

Smallwood, Lyn. “Reviews: James Lavadour at Cliff Michel, Seattle.” ARTnews, vol. 90, no. 1, January.

Failing, Patricia. “Sex, Landscape, and Videotapes: The Pacific Northwest.” ARTnews, vol. 90, no. 10, December.

1990

Allen, Lois. “Looking at the Land.” Artweek, August 12.

“Land Forms.” Willamette Week, August 12.

Bryant, Elizabeth. “James Lavadour: Anatomy of a Landscape.” Reflex, vol. 4, no. 5, September

Glowen, Ron. “Review of Exhibitions: James Lavadour at Cliff Michel, Seattle.” Art in America, vol. 78, no. 6, December.

Gragg, Randy. “James Lavadour: Merging Man and Nature.” Portland Oregonian, July 15.

“Landscapes of the Mind.” Seattle Weekly, May 16.

“Presence as Absence: James Lavadour at the Oregon Art Institute.” Artweek, September.

Tarzan-Arment, Deloris. The Seattle Times, May 14.

1989

Berger, David. “Crossed Cultures.” Seattle Times, April 12.

Manuel, Bruce. “Art Spawned by a Clash of Cultures.” Christian Science Monitor, June 12.

“James Lavadour’s Mountain View.” Northwest Magazine/Portland Oregonian, November 26.

Hackett, Regina. “Crossed Cultures.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 12.

Dana, Gail. “Waiting for the Muse.” Willamette Week, February.

1988

Barden, Renardo. “Visual Arts: James Lavadour at Elizabeth Leach.” Willamette Week, July.

Carlson, Jay. “Amoral landscape: James Lavadour at Elizabeth Leach.” Reflex. vol. 2, no. 5, September.

1987

Kangas, Matthew. “Un-representative Samplings: Northwest ‘87.” The Seattle Weekly, August/September.

“Spirits in Time: Portfolio.” Oregon Magazine, February/March.

1986

Berkson, Bill. “The Northwest Art Scene.” Art in America, vol. 74, no. 7, July/September.

“Northwest Now: Tacoma Art Museum.” Artweek, April.

1984

Anderson, David Charles. “Innovations: New Expression in Native American Painting.” Artspace, Spring.

Community Art Services

1990 - present

Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts: Founder, past president and current board member. Located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Pendleton, OR

Resources:

http://www.crowsshadow.org/pages/home

http://pdxcontemporaryart.com/lavadour

http://blog.oregonlive.com/visualarts/2008/01/art_preview_james_lavadour_at.html

http://kboo.fm/node/20446

http://www.lovelake.org/event_of_painting_James_Lavadour.htm

http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/The-Future-of-Native-Arts/

Rose Bean Simpson - Santa Clara Pueblo

wredstarresearchcenter — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:50:39 -0500

Interview by Angie (Kichi) Collier

Winter 2011

Rose Bean Simpson is a multi-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo. I was immediately drawn to her work because of her diverse styles, including comic art, sculpture, music, and spray paint. After watching Artisode 1.3- KNME (Rose Bean Simpson) I knew right away that I wanted to interview her for this project. I felt very encouraged by her voice, and that she was someone I could identify with. I have a great respect for any woman who is creating art that challenges mass media and objectifications. Rather than numbing one’s soul, Rose Bean Simpson is trying to enliven, strengthen, and build the soul. She is not afraid to be who she is, in her natural, beautiful state, and this not only shows through her voice, but through her artwork as well. I am honored that I was able to interview someone who is actively transforming the negative effects of our media, and someone who is honestly connected to the purity of life. Through my own journey as an artist, I have experienced moments of complete frustration, and even oppression, due to the domination of our media society, so not only was discovering Rose a breath of fresh air, but I was truly inspired.

Kichi Sol: I am very interested in your sculpture “To Fill That Hole.” I was wondering if you could explain the meaning behind the ‘hole’ and also give some information about what you placed inside the hole, and what those objects are representing. I also noticed a similar hole on your sculpture “Protector.” Are these sculptures connected?

Rose Bean Simpson: In the sculpture “To Fill That Hole”, I had placed within the bars, multi-colored small faces. Much of my work is about looking inward, and trying to see or expose what is on the “inside”. (Emotionally, psychologically). I put small viewing spaces in my work for a while because they were all about revealing an inner truth.

In the piece “To Fill That Hole”, the hole represented the sense of emptiness we may feel, or not feeling whole until we “have” something else, other than ourselves. In this specific piece, the “hole” through is the space of pain, abuse, or lack. It has been filled with people, that being relationships with the outside world in order to fulfill something within. No matter how many people I try to fill the hole with, I am still not whole. The piece then must find something else, because her view has been directed and judgmental, which makes her helpless.

It is displaying a state of disempowerment.

In “Protector”, the piece has found something beautiful within, which is manifested in the form of a pinecone. This particular piece was about sexuality, and the judgments behind what the western world considers “sexy” to be. The most incredibly sexy thing I had seen was a pinecone, bursting with creation. In that space I felt that true sexuality and understanding needed to be protected from the negative, abusive, and destructive sexual energy that pervades our media society.

KS: While studying your work, I found a common theme of eye articles, either sculpted or painted, all in which were located on the right eye. Such as Vessel, To Fill That Hole, your Self-Portrait, Protector and Two Spirit. I was interested in the meaning behind the eyepieces, and if there is any significance with the right eye?

RBS: Interesting. I never noticed before which eye was in some way covered.

I suppose what I was trying to say through representing vision (or lack thereof,) is the judgmental filter through which we (have been taught to) perceive the world. We can “see” but sometimes we don’t see what is really there, because we are too busy categorizing, judging, or idealizing aspects of our reality, which keeps us from being truly present and open minded to the possibilities in life.

I was told recently that the right eye could represent your relationship with your father, and your left, your mother. (depending on which hand is your dominant one.) I was told that my relationship with my father hadn’t been very good because I see the world critically through my right eye. When I close my left eye and look through my right, the world is a very scary place. When I close my right and see through my left, I want to giggle. The difference is very clear to me, but I never saw that come through my work.

Thank you for pointing that out. That is very interesting.

KS: I noticed much of your work, especially the pieces with the right eye emphasized, resemble you. Are all of these pieces self-portraits, or in some shape or form a depiction of yourself?

RBS: I find it easiest to be honest if I am portraying myself. It is more difficult to relate to something that I don’t feel from the inside. If I make something other than myself, I feel that I am projecting some sort of ideal onto someone else that may not ring true to him or her. Again, it is important to focus within. It is much easier to lead by example. :)

KS: I noticed many of your pieces seem to be influenced by hip-hop culture, which challenges traditional Native concept. How has hip-hop culture influenced you as an artist? And how do you view the break from traditional Native art?

RBS: I feel that the (Underground) Hip-Hop and Punk Rock cultures have influenced me in that they are an incredible mode of empowerment for youth. Because many of our own traditional Native cultures are on the threat of extinction, they are not very flexible to grow with the new generations, for better or for worse. Therefore, providing an opportunity to feel a part of a culture, and a part of creating what it is. I feel that at this point, because of the amount of Indigenous youth who feel a part of either Hip Hop or Punk Rock cultures, it then becomes traditional. When the Hip-Hop generation is the elders, it will inevitably influence our actions. As long as I am Indigenous and an artist, I am doing traditional Native art, be it on the side of a train, a patch on my jacket, or polishing a pit-fire clay vessel. Art is life.

KS: As a contemporary Native artist, do you receive criticism from elders in the Native community for not staying within the realm of traditional? If so, how do you confront this criticism?

RBS: I had an incredible opportunity to be raised by elders who were the groundbreakers of their times, providing me with the freedom to move forward in ways that they may have struggled to achieve. My grandmother, Rina Swentzell, is a great philosopher and writer. My Great Uncle, Michael Naranjo, is an incredible sculptor, even though he is blind. My Great Aunt, Nora Naranjo-Morse, is an incredibly dynamic contemporary artist and great mentor. My mother, Roxanne Swentzell, fought against many hard stereotypes that I have never had to face, allowing me to ask questions through my work and not think twice.

Because of my own experience within my culture, I have my own boundaries as to what is inappropriate. It is more on a scale of; is this healthy, or is this not.

KS: How has growing up in Santa Fe contributed or restricted you as a Native artist? Do you feel expectations to produce a ‘Santa Fe’ body of work?

RBS: I actually grew up in Santa Clara Pueblo, adjacent to the town of Espanola (the low-rider capital of the world,) north of Santa Fe. The market exists in Santa Fe, and so does my comfort zone. I like to work on evading expectations, which is why I came to RISD to pursue an MFA out of my comfort zone. I plan to return to the Santa Fe area, and, with what I have learned, help disrupt the stereotype that it has been confined in (with many other great artists who are working to do the same.)

KS: Your graduate work seems to be evolving into a completely different style than your earlier post-grad work. How do you find this evolution to reflect your own mind, body, and spiritual growth? Do you see any correlation with your newer pieces and the difference of your location, from Santa Fe to Rhode Island?

RBS: If I have a different audience, I will say different things. I have noticed that I take some indigenous sensitivity for granted, and when I learned that people know very little about my culture-based aesthetic, I am forced to deconstruct my expression further in order to better communicate. I see this opportunity as a blessing. Because of this process, I am learning how to better communicate with myself.

Biography

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), daughter of clay sculptor Roxanne Swentzell and Patrick Simpson, a wood and metal contemporary artist, Rose has experienced art throughout her life in Santa Fe and on the Santa Clara Pueblo Reservation. Being from both Indigenous and European descent, with art and philosophy primary in both families, she pursues her pure expression of truth through ceramic sculpture, drawing, printmaking, writing, music, and dance.

After studying at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, she received a BFA in Studio Arts in 2007. In her short career she has been able to participate in many shows, including “Relations; Indigenous Dialogue”, an exhibition in 2006 at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, NM, featured in Art In America magazine. She, Nora Naranjo-Morse and Eliza Naranjo Morse were a collaborative art team and the only New Mexico artists chosen to participate in the 2008 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, a global invitational exhibit.

In the summer of 2010 she kicked off the Institute of American Indian Arts “Visions” project with her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art. She is currently represented by Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM, and working on her MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design, to graduate in 2011.

All resources and images taken from:

http://www.rosebsimpson.com/bio.html

Lillian Pitt-Wak-amu’

wredstarresearchcenter — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 11:36:17 -0500

Interviewed by Linda Meanus

Winter 2012

Linda Meanus: Where do you see your work fitting into the contemporary Native world as a nationally renowned sculptor and mixed media artist?

Lillian Pitt: Primarily a sculptor and mixed media artist, I am renowned for my extraordinary masks in various media (including astounding ones made of glass). My best known works are the series of portraits of “She Who Watches,” a famous petroglyph in the Columbia River Gorge. “Tsagaglal” is the image called by the First peoples, has long been a symbol of conscience, of death, and of endurance among the people of the mighty river. I am also an artist of International stature. Still my goal is to incorporate as best as I can, the traditional Native American arts of my ancestors into the contemporary art that I create for people living in these modern times.

“She Who Watches” sculpt in 1950’s or early 60’s.

LM: When you interact with other artists, is it important to understand each person/artist experience with their cultural connection? Do you give voice to the Ancestors as you work?

LP: I am pretty well known and regarded highly among other artists in the Native American art world, and works in collaboration with other artists on public art projects and special projects. I have worked with Phillip Charette, James Lavadour, Joe Fedderson, and Rick Bartow.

The Salmon rattle- 2007

Every time I do, regardless of medium, honor my ancestors, and ties to give voice to the people, animals of this place, and to the land. I maintain a link with traditions about honoring the contributions my ancestors made to this world. I feel that making art is a sacred art. It is sacred to me—when I am working I grow very calm, peaceful and meditative. There is a great magic intimacy, closeness with what is here and now in your hands, which feels like a great blessing. A miracle in hand in art, and story, where the future lives and when the future is possible, where the future can be born, if we witness it with humility, and lure it forth with respect and hard work.

LM: Do you identify with your Warm Springs historical perspective compared to the American perspective and have strong connection to the past? Or have a combination of all those views?

LP: To some native River people, visiting “She Who Watches,” her images is like going to church, she is so sacred. When I sculpt her, I do the best I possibly can to create her as possible, because she feels she is showing a special image and one who watched over her ancestors, it is her way of honoring the place, the people and her culture. I love what I do, speaking of my ancestors to the next generation with the hope they can see the reverence in my work.

One time, when there was a show somewhere in South Dakota showing some of my 2D works, a North Dakota elder asked if I had permission from my spirits to create those prints that I had etched. I sincerely felt at the time I had, and thanked the elder for helping me to stay true to the inner meaning of my work. I am forever grateful to the elder for reminding me of my true obligations as an artist.

LM: What or who has inspired you to be an Artist?

LP: My inspiration comes from the Columbia River Gorge area where my ancestors lived for over 10,000 years. I also attribute much of my success as an artist and in my life overall, to the friends and creative spirits I met along the way.

R.C. Gorman was an amazing inspiration to me, and will always be grateful to R.C. for giving me the help and support I needed over all those years. R.C. had bought some of my masks, and which shocked me and from that point on, I was hooked. I am now an artist.

LM: Have you ever envisioned your art to be where it is today? How do you envision your art for the future?

LP: My first early personal vision grew from the discovery of “She Who Watches,” (Tsagaglal) a petroglyph of a female chief changed into a rock by coyote who lived along the Big River. “She Who Watches,” once overlooked the village of N’xluldix, the home of my grandmother. She Who Watches is an enduring symbol of female wisdom, peace and prosperity. Tsagaglal serves as a personal and professional inspiration for me and my family. Archetypal images provide points of reference to achieving balance with us, our community, and our world.

Coyote and She Who Watches-2010

Everything I do directly honors my ancestors and gives voice to the people, the environment and the animals. In our tradition, the creator, “Naami Piyap” says we are caretakers of the land and are the voice of the land and the life upon it. That is our law.

LM: Do you bring an indigenous presence to the Art microcosm and that you are able to educate to open eyes to the importance of indigenous perspective?

LP: The differences between traditional Native American art ways overtime, I doubt that my goals to educate people through my art will ever change. It has been a great honor to show my works at special exhibits aimed as much toward educating people about Native American art and culture, as toward selling arts. “My art is more than just art for “art’s sake.” Beyond sheer enjoyment, I get out of creating beautiful art and seeing people buy my art, my goal has always been to give people a glimpse into another world—into another way of life.”

LM: Is it important for your artwork to educate your audience on your cultural background?

LP: My art has always been about giving voice to my ancestors, and about helping people broaden their point of view about who Native Americans were and still are. The same is true about the many exhibits I have been involved in over the years.

I always thank the many organizations who have honored me by allowing me to bring special exhibits and installation into their communities, so that people cannot only be thrilled with what they see, but; so they can learn, too.

LM: What is your favorite choice of medium? What medium do you have more fun working on?

Crow and Crow building his house-2010

LP: No other medium is more fun for me is working with is the mixed media. There creative possibilities are endless. I mix new objects with old objects, traditional and contemporary, still with porcelain, feathers and beads, you name it, anything goes! All my mixed media works of art tell stories of my Native American ancestors. But, with my mixed media, I sometimes am able to elaborate more on the story—-I jazz up a bit, add a different twist or angle. I always say that all of my mixed media that I work on, it is the mixed media pieces that make me feel more creative. It is like playing.

LM: Does it get difficult to incorporate the Native American arts of the ancestors into the Contemporary art you create for people living in these modern times?

LP: I have spent a lot of time learning about my ancestors and studying the designs that the ancestors created…their baskets, beaded bags, dresses, rock carvings, and the tools they used—-you name it, I have tried to incorporate as best as I can, the traditional Native American arts of my ancestors into the contemporary art that I create for people in today’s world.

LM: Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

LP: Wendy Red Star and Rick Bartow.

Resources:

http://www.lillianpitt.com/

Biography: Lillian Pitt was born in 1943 on the Warm Springs Reservation in the high sage desert of Oregon. She is Warm Springs, Wasco, and Yakama ancestry, and a vivid artist of the Pacific Northwest.

She is a sculptor and mixed media artist, Lillian is renowned for her extraordinary masks in various media, including astounding ones made of glass. Perhaps her best-known works are of dizzying series of portraits of “She Who Watches,” a famous pictograph in the Columbia Gorge. Tsagaglal as the image is called by the First Peoples of the Mighty River. She has images of many works of spiritual traditions of her people: Spider Woman, honoring mothers; Feather woman, honoring teachers; Hawk Woman;

Coyote Woman and many more.

Everything that she does, regardless of medium, honors her ancestors, and tries to give voice to the people, the land, and the animals of the place. It is all, for her, about maintaining a link with traditions, about honoring the contributions of her ancestors.

She was never given the opportunity of learning her way of life, and was never considered of being Indian until she started learning of her ancestors and the way of life she was taught growing up. All the education she was taught and learning about her ancestors from 10,000 years ago until now has given her blessings of her father and mother.

She identifies herself as a human first then a woman, then an Indian woman then finally an artist. She inspirations comes from the Columbia river gorge area where her ancestors lived for over 10,000 years.

No matter what media she does, she gives voice to her people and feels that her work will be part of history.

“Stick Indian” is her latest project she is finishing up. Legend is when you go to the mountains, and you are bad, you will get lost! But, if you are good, and you hear a whistling sound, you follow it and you will find your way out—2012.

Thunderbird-build on the Columbia River “in lieu” fishing sites to mark where they can fish at. (2000)

Duane Slick - Meskwaki Nation / Ho-Chunk

wredstarresearchcenter — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 20:44:00 -0500

Interviewed by Rebecca Leiv

Winter 2012

Duane Slick, North American Palindrome with Portrait of Bull Ghost, 2003

Rebecca Leiv: I looked at your paintings for the Art in Embassies program. Please tell me what was involved in having your work chosen for display at an American Embassy?

Duane Slick: The work was initially chosen after being reproduced in a book titled, “The Telling of the World; Creation Myths from Native America.” I was approached after being referred by one of my galleries, that was in the 1990’s. In fact I have had the same painting selected for the Embassies program, the first exhibition went to Dusseldorf and the second went to Vietnam. Generally, it has been the galleries who are placing the work in these exhibitions.

RL: Was it more important for the program that you are an American artist or a Native artist?

DS: I believe in all instances the work had some hyphen regarding the Native artist.

http://art.state.gov/default.aspx

RL: Is it important that your work, as a Contemporary Native artist, is viewed in another country?

DS: Of course it is. I would like to get my work out into the world in as broad a way as possible. These exhibitions often featured traditional work alongside the contemporary, and that is a point of honor as well. I am guessing you are alluding to the artist-who-is-Indian or Indian-artist argument. In which case I am in agreement with the faction that says, “Why do I have to choose?” I have colleagues who are African-American and refuse to be in exhibitions that say African-American Artist in the title. I am guessing they are referring to a type of essentialism or the accusation that such titles, “ghetto-ize” the artist of color. I can see that, but at the end of the day the framework of my identity as a native man is part of the content of the work. I have known adults from different generations who hid themselves, I just cannot do that. My parents and elders would not be happy about that, they too worked hard to make certain we are standing where we are today.

RL: How does your background and history affect your work? Does either your schooling or your upbringing affect your work more? How does your family react to your work?

DS: My background and history inform my work every day. We juggle many things in the process of research, process and execution. I had written a statement that accompanies my current lectures and exhibitions that follows my idea that the past is in the present. It is titled “The Untraceable Present,” and it goes like this:

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.

I have been gifted or cursed with a really strong memory. I can recall details from childhood, from discussions with my family and relatives at different points in their lives, from events I have participated in that involve family or events with other Native people. This includes my readings of histories and theory. I don’t see a simple line of cause and effect, rather a network of intertwined lines of cause and effect. I also come from two often very different tribal nations and I was raised urban. I would speculate that such insider/outsider status at all levels creates such a need for this “condition of vision.”

RL: Schooling or upbringing?

DS: Well it sounds like a nature/nurture question. The answer is both. I would not be where I am now had I not learned and viewed as much art from the 20th century as I have. We are all in some manner students of a particular medium. As such to remain viable we need to find a way of participating in the moment. Schooling provides the tools needed and the distance to make decisions. Upbringing makes me remember my early days when I did a lot of experimentation with depictions of my identity as a young Native dude. Back in the 1980’s in Iowa I was painting more from post-WWII existential artists such as Giacometti and Dubuffet. I could leave the figure for American abstraction. But Upbringing and it specificities were always part of the decision making.

My family was very supportive and my relatives and elders from both tribes always said the same thing,” Whatever it is you are doing we are proud, finish what you started, whatever you do, finish what you have started.” Sadly, I just had a ten-year survey show in Iowa and both my parents have recently passed, so they did not get to see it. My Aunt from the Ho-Chunk nation came to the opening and she was very proud and awed.

RL: While researching Native American and First Nations art, I have found that most of the information available references either Traditional Native art, or the stereotyped commercial offerings. Have you encountered the common perception that all Native art consists of the Traditional forms? How do you counter that perception?

DS: I think you would need to clarify what you perceive as stereotyped commercial offerings, I would want to be on the same page in terms of our definitions before I feel I can respond fully. But, Let me try anyway:

I attended a College Art Association Conference in 1991 where James Luna chaired a panel titled,” Everyone Needs an Indian.” The panelists included, James, Jaune Quick-To-See-Smith, Truman Lowe, and Rick Hill. After a four riveting presentations on the coming Columbus quincentennial and the developing revisionist movement, the time for audience questions arrives. The first question to come from the audience is, “ What does the Native American Community think of the phenomena of crop circles.”
It was the panel gasp that should have been heard around the world.

I wonder what this questioner wanted to hear.

RL: Do you feel that your audience needs to be educated about Native Art? Do you feel comfortable doing the educating?

DS: Doing the Schooling? Yes, in general an audience does often need some information regarding the context of Native art and its function. But there are so many aspects to touch upon and I don’t know that all of the particulars need to be covered. In terms of my audience, I feel as though I am addressing as much the dialogue in painting as I am issues of Native art or Native identity. I think there is a distinction that needs to be made on those two points.

Further, Native art as practiced in Native communities might be a different story. In 1994, when I taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the writer, Bell Hooks came as a visiting artist. In her lecture she spoke about the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the one that was called “multi-culti.” In her lecture Bell Hooks said, “I applaud the Whitney’s efforts at inclusion, but at no point in any of the work was whiteness not at the center.”

I have wondered how much native communities need an art world. Native communities have their own traditions that have red-ness at their center, and the issue of function, community, and their “spiritual economies” (my term) are the subject of their work.

RL: I saw that you are a recipient of the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art. Congratulations. Please talk about the process that resulted in the work you submitted for the Fellowship. The work “Water’s Edge” seems political as well as lyrical. Could you give us some insight into the piece?

Water’s Edge 2009

DS: The Eiteljorg Fellowship was a great honor. I am so pleased to have been selected and the support they offer in addition to the award is unprecedented. I have been applying to the fellowship for years. So, my turn had arrived. I say that because that is the nature of grants and residencies, keep applying and keep working. Jennifer Complo-McNutt was the lead curator for the exhibition and she did very thorough studio visits with each of the artists, so together we determined the work that was included.

“Waters Edge” is acrylic on glass and was painted in 2009. That was the year after my father’s death from lymphoma. That was a tough period as he chose home hospice and my family and I were his caregivers. He was a veteran of the Korean War and was accorded a full Meskwaki veterans funeral. As you may know, veteran status figures prominently in Native communities and his flag was one of the icons I remembered after everything was over. In Waters Edge the image is painted very delicately, in washes of white paint on a black ground. They are painted from set-ups I photographed in my studio. The wolf or coyote, peers is pictured wading in the wake of the flags stripes and is peering over the edge. The American flag in this context is painted as an object and handled in a way that the flag is not intended to handled. The careful execution gives the painting surface, the objects painted and the narrative a sense of quiet and timelessness.

RL: What are you working on now? What art have you looked at recently? What should others be looking at?

DS: I am currently working on a series of large stripe paintings, they are a continuation of the flag paintings and the themes from that body of work. I have been working under the umbrella title, “The untraceable Present.” The stripe paintings are a collection of works that fall under the title of: “Stacked horizons,” and “Multiplicities of Sunrises.” I began to grow fatigued from the realist work as it would take months to finish a single painting, building from thin washes of white, working from photographs and using .001 brushes. I wanted something that brought back the spontaneity that can occur in painting and was a bit more performative. I also wanted to work larger, the glass paintings are around 19x19, and the new work is 70x47. I had actually been thinking about the stripes of the flag and the patterning that was occurring in those paintings. Since the glass paintings are often sited in the landscape, I decided to retain that subject, but use only the horizontal bands. Many recent viewers compare the experience of the stripes to a kind of vertical roll you would see on a television.

RL: Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

DS: Have you contacted C. Maxx Stevens? I have a grad student from Canada, Wally Dion. He better have some interesting thoughts. He is pretty well connected to the Canadian scene. How about Tom Jones and John Hitchcock? They are up at Univ.-Wisconsin, Madison.

Links:

http://www.duaneslickstudios.com/

http://www.iaia.edu/museum/vision-project/artists/duane-slick/

http://fellowship.eiteljorg.org/#fellows::ArtistProfile?value=216

http://sarweb.org/?artist_duane_slick

http://www.risd.edu/Painting/Duane_Slick/

http://art.state.gov/artistdetail.aspx?id=100136

Dana Claxton - Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux

wredstarresearchcenter — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:23:00 -0500

Interviewed by Elizabeth Neal

Winter 2012

Dana Claxton, a First Nations artist, was born in Yorkton in northeastern Saskatchewan, and incorporates themes from her Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux heritage into her film, performance art, and photography. Her work explores ecological themes, ideas about beauty, spirituality, and the impact of colonialism on indigenous North Americans, the latter being particularly personal, as her family migrated to Canada from the United States with Sitting Bull. Her works, such as Buffalo Bone China (1997), which cast a light on the slaughter of the wild buffalo for a European luxury item, bring together historical actions and their lasting consequences. Although her work exposes the darkness of American imperial injustices, she has also cited “the beauty of Lakota culture and teachings” as equal inspiration for her artistic endeavors.

Elizabeth Neal: You have exhibited your work overseas, including in Australia, France, Hong Kong, and Poland. How does that experience differ from exhibiting in North America? How do those audiences receive your pieces?

Dana Claxton: Many years ago, I thought I only wanted to “talk” to North Americans through my work regarding Native American history and contemporary life, since I felt that so few people knew the history of the land and the ancient people. The exhibition space is a complicated site. After having several shows internationally, I realize that my art is for all people - in all countries and hopefully they all engage with the ideas - which are really based in honesty, respect and courage. The courage to know really the history of this land and ancient people and the courage to know Indian people now.

EN: Your recent performance piece The Elsewhere (September 2011) has been cited as an attempt to “Indianize space” through the use of gesture, music, and natural and man-made objects. I interpret the title of the piece as a reference to transporting the viewer/participant to a space that is in between a gallery for observation and a space that is much more personal in nature. Would you please elaborate on what you had in mind with the title? What would you like the audience to relate it to in a broader sense, if anything?

DC: For me the elsewhere is going beyond matter into the realm of spirit and I was hoping to take the audience with me, which I am told some did! Also, at the end of the performance I had a “giveaway” and offered the audience to come up and have something from the performance - either stones or shells.

The Elsewhere (2011)

EN: What is your favorite kind of space to present your work? Do you have any specific criteria when you consider a space?

DC: Space is a funny thing. Sometimes I like spacious white spaces, other times small and intimate. Indian and non-indian spaces. I don’t have a fav or criteria and try and work with the space that is provided and then sometimes I make works with spaces in mind. Space can be political, nurturing, disturbing, spiritual, demanding, aloof, controlling, liberating…. space is a complex place for artists and the viewer as so much takes place between the art and the viewer. Sometimes joy, sometimes sadness, sometimes confusion, sometimes deep connections…. the room is full of thought and experience really, besides just simply viewing the “object”, the space provides a site for an enormous exchange between art and the viewer.

EN: Tania Willard, the curator of Starting From Home, an online retrospective of your work, has said that laughter is part of your culture’s survival, that survival being an important part of your work. Your work is necessarily political and involves some very dark themes. Do you incorporate that humor into your pieces in any way? Or do you approach their conception with this humor in mind?

DC: I am not sure what you mean by dark themes – oppression? Forced assimilation? Genocide? Which dark themes….the ghosts of history that become contemporary vampires! I think my humor is sly. When I made Mustang Suite, I was reworking stereotypes and some of the works in that series have a flow of humour and irony. I haven’t really approached my work with humor in mind - but will at some point. Although some of the funniest people I know are Indians - Indian humor is very specific.

Daddy’s Got a Mustang (2009) 4ft x 5ft c print

EN: Aside from the media you use in your work, how has your background teaching television and radio broadcasting informed your art?

DC: I have ever only taught television/ radio broadcasting for one term as a guest to the School of Journalism at the U of Regina. My teaching in production hasn’t influenced my practice. If anything I have been influenced by early music videos and old black and white movies, for their use of technology, fast paced editing and pushing the genre forward, backwards, inside out. My early videos had a music video aesthetic and my new dramatic short form feature has this sensibility both visually and with streams of hip hop and other original music by OS12 (Musqueam Rapper).

EN: Natural elements are an important part of much of your work, such as the offerings in Ablakela (1999), water in Waterspeak (2002) and “decolonized landscapes,” such as in Landscape #1 (2004), among others. These are, of course, only parts of the whole experience, but what do you hope an urban audience will learn from exposure to images of these elements in a modern indoor setting?

DC: That maka (earth) is alive and so is everything else, water, air, butterflies, streams, stones even, and that we must pay heed and respect and be grateful to all that is provided for us to live.

Waterspeak (2002)

EN: Your 1998 film Yuxweluptun: Man of Masks focused on the art of contemporary Salish artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, whose highly political work includes exhibiting bullet-ridden pages of “The Indian Act” that he himself shot. I know that your work is also deeply rooted in confronting political inequities and the violence of history. How did you become interested in filming him?

DC: I have been interested in Yuxweluptun’s work for many years, primarily his large-scale paintings. When the grunt gallery and Glenn Alteen were producing the performance in England with Locus +, it was during the same time, I was beginning to make a documentary project on the artist with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). As a performance artist myself, I was intrigued by the “action” of shooting this legislated oppression. As he stated in the documentary his business was finished at the “ shoot out at the UK corral”. Because of Canada’s imperial and colonial history with the Queen/empire/monarchy an the Indian Act was spawned by the British North American Act, the artist wanted to shoot in the country that was implicated in legally oppressing aboriginal people. Of course nowadays, it’s a Canadian policy and American policy to still oppress Indian people through law. The Indian act was and still is, an extremely racist document that implicated the entire legal system in the suppression of Indian people. As well as the church and the state itself. What lingers in the air we breath in Canada and the United States is the structural dehumanization of Indian people in our public and private institutions. For all the glory and outstanding accomplishments that we have had, the racist attitudes of history still linger in strange ways…the ghosts of the past, haunt contemporary life.

So I was interested in his idea of celebration, he wanted to honour the guns for shooting such a racist piece of legislation and decorated them with ribbons and beads. Keep in mind, he was first generation public school – when Indians were allowed to go to public schools…and when he crossed the “colour line” – white parents threw tomatoes at his father’s car.

Canada has a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to finally deal with its brutal history of harming Indians through forced religious conversion and the residential school project. We still have a ways to go here, as does the United States if we consider that the Lakota have never signed a treaty for the Black Hills. Canada and the United States have a complicated history that greatly harmed the ancient people on their ancient homeland…there is unfinished business that needs to be addressed, so our countries can be the great places of democracy that they claim to be.

EN: As both an artist and curator, how vital do you consider collaborations with fellow contemporary Indigenous artists?

DC: I make films and large format photographs of people. Certainly filmmaking requires working with many people on set, as does making a photo series. I have worked with a crew anywhere from 4 to 30, but not so much as collaboration of the ideas, but rather a collaboration of getting the work complete. Certainly, co-curating is a collaborative effort and I recently worked on an online project with Tania Williard, we co- wrote an essay as well. It was a wonderful experience working with her, as our intentions were very similar and both of our practices are deeply rooted in areas of the spiritual, cultural and the socio-political. I haven’t made an actual art project that was collaborative but would like to someday.

Buffalo Bone China (1997)

EN: Could you please say something about the process you go through when you are brainstorming for ideas? Do you rely on writing, still photography, or some other medium when you are in the conceptual phase? How much of your material has arisen from your longstanding role as an educator?

DC: I pay heed to the dreamworld. I work very intuitively. I am not sure how my role as a professor and my art making intersect, but certainly, lately teaching theory, these ideas have sparked creative ideas. Generally I am inspired by the natural world and the supernatural world, in addition to spiritual and socio-political realties.

EN: Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?

DC: What kind of separation do you suggest? Cultural? Class? Intentions? I think it can be agreed that in the United States your public and private gallery systems lack the visibility of contemporary North American Indigenous art. Why? If we chart the large public contemporary art institutions in any large American city how often to they exhibit contemporary North American Indigenous contemporary art? Certainly, we see this happening more and more in both Canada and the Untited States, as well as this continent and around the world. So the future looks bright!

EN: Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

DC: Kent Monkman, Fay Heavyshield, Skeena Reece

EN: Thank you!

Bio:

Dana Claxton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes film and video, installation, performance and photography. Her work is held in public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Bank of Canada. Her work has been screened internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis). Her work has been screened at Sundance Festival and Microwave in Hong Kong.

She has taught at the Indigenous Media Arts Group and Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver and she was the 2003 Global Television Chair at the University of Regina in the School of Journalism where she taught Television and Radio broadcasting from the perspective of critical thinking and experimentation with sound and images. Dana was awarded the prestigious VIVA Award from the Doris and Jack Shadbolt Foundation and in 2007 became an Eiteljorg Fellow sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

She is an active member in the arts community and has participated in panel discussions, juries, curatorial projects, advisory committees, mentoring youth and young artists. She is of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux ancestry and her family reserve is Wood Mountain.

-from www.danaclaxton.com

Further information about Dana Claxton’s work can be found on the following websites:

http://www.danaclaxton.com/

http://conundrumonline.org/Issue_4/Dana_Claxtons_The_Patient_Storm.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbG3CbAy5vc

Kathleen Ash-Milby -Navajo

wredstarresearchcenter — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 14:54:00 -0500

Interviewed by Chela Perley

Winter 2012

Kathleen Ash-Milby is an associate curator of contemporary Indigenous art at the National Museum of the American Indian – George Gustav Heye Center, Smithsonian Institution in New York City. She was born and raised in the Southwest. I chose Kathleen in part because I have been drawn for so many years to the Southwest and its rich cultural heritage. I was introduced to Kathleen when I was looking in the HIDE: Skin As Material and Metaphor publication that was one of many books available to introduce us to contemporary Indigenous artists and curators. This publication and the HIDE exhibit were her inspiration and brainchild, through which she was introduced to Sonya Kelliher-Combs, an artist I interviewed for the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists blog. Kathleen worked closely with Sonya, as well as other contemporary indigenous artists to create artwork that explores the aspects of skin within the Native American and Alaska Native community. Through this interview process and getting to know Kathleen and her work, I found her to be deeply committed to bringing more attention to contemporary Indigenous artists and their artwork. One of the most moving things that Kathleen said during the interview was that curating is her “life’s work.” I find that very inspiring as an artist and as a person. Her responses were thoughtful, thorough, intelligent, and very informative. I would like to thank Kathleen for her participation in this interview.

Chela Perley: I’ve read that you were born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and that you are part of the Navajo Nation. What were some of the earlier art influences in your life that made you interested in pursuing a degree in art history?

Kathleen Ash-Milby: Even though both of my parents had degrees in the sciences, many of my Navajo relatives worked in the arts, either as art teachers or practicing artists. My maternal grandmother taught Navajo art, language and culture at Fort Lewis College, and after she retired she was always working on one project or another. Art was just part of this part of my family’s life. And even though my parents weren’t “arty,” as my Dad would say, they taught my brother and I to appreciate things like fine art and music by taking us to museums during our travels and letting me take art classes in the summer and afterschool.

CP: I see that you have a B.A. in Art History from the University of Washington and a Master’s Degree in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. How did you decide to focus on art history as your concentration in undergraduate school? At what point did you decide that you wanted to pursue a Master’s in Native American Art History?

KAM: As an undergraduate in a small liberal arts college, I actually started out as a studio art major. I was most interested in 2-D work, such as drawing, but spent a year in the ceramics studio. I enjoyed trying out different media and didn’t feel ready to choose a concentration. At the same time, I was taking art history courses and just loving them. When I transferred to the University of Washington, I discovered I could major in art history and switched my focus immediately. There were just too many courses that I couldn’t pass up.

As a senior, I was looking into graduate programs with strong contemporary and modern art history programs. Around the same time, I was introduced to contemporary Native art while poking around in the library researching something for a historic Native art history class. Something just really clicked for me at that moment. The University of New Mexico seemed to have the most comprehensive Native American art history program that wouldn’t dictate my focus from day one, plus they ended up offering me a great package of support.

CP: Can you talk a little bit about your experience as a curatorial research assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and how that played a part in your decision to become a curator? What were some of the influencing factors?

KAM: I assisted visiting researchers, helping them access records and assisting them in the collections. I also, of course, assisted the curators with research and exhibitions development. I gained experience in several areas of the collection, but my interest was really in contemporary art, which wasn’t getting much attention by the museum at the time. So, I pursued my own research of the museum’s collection of paintings and works on paper in between my research assistant duties and assignments. In 1998 I received a Collections Research Award to support my research on an obscure deceased artist in our collection. My proposal included interviewing contemporary artists from this artist’s tribe of origin as well as archival research. It was a terrific opportunity and really cemented my interest in pursuing contemporary art projects.

CP: Would you share a bit more about this? Who was the obscure artist that led you to interviewing the contemporary artists you mentioned and who were the contemporary artists? What was so compelling in the interview process that inspired you to pursue contemporary art projects throughout the rest of your career?

KAM: The research project I was pursuing at the time concerned a neglected collection of paintings by Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nuñez (aka “Princess Wa Wa Chaw”). She was born in 1888 to a Luiseño mother in California and adopted and raised in New York City, according to her diaries. It was a compelling project to me because her life story was so unusual and the paintings weren’t even formally part of the museum’s collection at that time, even though the museum took possession after her death in 1972. She really wasn’t known in the Luiseño community either since she was removed as an infant. So, my idea with this grant was to re-introduce her to the community, and specifically, some of the active artists in that community, including Robert Freeman, Cathy Nelson-Rodriguez, James Luna, and Sandra Okuma. Luna assisted me locally in the La Jolla Reservation community, facilitating my community lecture and the artist interviews. The grant also included time in the archives at Sherman Indian School, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame (now the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum) in Oklahoma City.

Receiving the support for my research, which I had been doing on the side of my other duties, was a type of validation for the importance of this work. Having the opportunity to do the studio visits and interviews with the artists was also informative and stimulating to me. The entire experience really confirmed for me the need for this type of work with living artists. I realized at that time that this was something I could contribute to in the field.

CP: Before you became an Associate Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian you did some work as a freelance curator and worked as staff curator at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City. How did you become interested in curating Contemporary Native Arts? What were some of the earlier exhibition themes and Native Artists that you worked with during this time?

KAM: I left my position at the NMAI in 1999 when my job transferred from New York to Washington, DC. It was a difficult time in my personal life to relocate, plus I was feeling some frustration in not being able to spend more time pursuing my interest in contemporary art. It was a difficult choice to make, but ended up being the best decision because it freed me to pursue contemporary art projects as a freelancer. I didn’t make much money, but one opportunity lead to another, and eventually I ended up at the American Indian Community House organizing my own exhibitions.

CP: Would you consider art curation an art form unto itself? If so, how? If not, why? Do you still have an active studio art practice?

KAM: I definitely don’t define myself as an artist, nor do I maintain anything resembling a studio practice. However, I do think that my previous practice deeply informs my perception and understanding of materials as a curator. There has been some debate in the field about the role of the curator and its significance (or insignificance). I see my role as a connector or even a type of pointer. The most important thing I do is recognize important work and draw the larger world’s attention to this work by including it in my exhibitions, publications, and lectures. I want other people to see what I see. Because this is my life’s work, I have access to so much, and when I find things that fascinate or intrigue me, I want this work to receive the recognition it deserves. I’m pointing to this work for people to see. I also think it is one of my responsibilities to connect artists to opportunities, whether it is encouraging them to apply to specific artist residencies and funding opportunities, or introducing them to other people in the field. I love being a positive force and making a difference.

CP: Would you talk about what your experience has been working as a woman curator in a seemingly male dominated art world and particularly as a Native American woman working in the curation field? What have the challenges been and what have been the rewards?

KAM: In my experience, I haven’t found the field to be particularly male-dominated. Many of the curators and arts professionals I’ve worked with, even at mainstream institutions, have been women. It’s true that there are not many Native curators, directors, and other museum professionals in the United States working with contemporary Native art, but I am encouraged that there are several Native emerging scholars and writers. Canada has an impressive number of Indigenous contemporary art curators, so that bodes well for the future of the field. My situation, being a Native American curator of contemporary Native art, is not unique, but we are a small group with a very focused, specialization. On the one hand, this means our expertise is in demand. On the other hand, there is so much work to be done, it can be overwhelming!

CP: I am very interested in the HIDE: Skin As Material and Metaphor exhibit and the book that followed. I saw on the website that the show ran from March 6, 2010 to January 2011. I am also interviewing Sonya Kelliher-Combs for the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists blog, who was one of the artists you invited to work on this project with you. How did you become aware of her work? What about Sonya’s work drew you to invite her to participate? I am very interested to know what the curating process as a whole is for an exhibit such as Hide. Would you talk about what the inspirations were both personally and professionally for the exhibit and book? How long did the overall exhibit and the book take to plan and come to fruition? Was the book written as a byproduct of the show or was there always a plan to publish the book as a part of the exhibit?

KAM: I began thinking about this project during a visit to the Eiteljorg Museum for their 2007 Native American Fine Art Fellowship. I was completely taken by Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s work, particularly her synthetic “skins” such as, “Unraveled Gray Secret,” and other works from a series titled, “Walrus Family Portraits.” I had seen reproductions of her work before, but those images didn’t capture the translucency, the textures or layers in these works. It also made me think immediately of work by Nadia Myre, such as “The Scar Project,” which also used virtual skins symbolic of deeper meaning. There was definitely a dialogue, both formal and conceptual, that I could see between the two artists’ work, which made me start chewing on this idea of skin, and it’s multiple meanings (and complications) to Native people. These ideas were expressed especially in photographic work, such as a series, “Mask,” by Arthur Renwick, which was particularly confrontational.

Soon after this, I began discussing some of my ideas with our Exhibition Director at the museum, Peter Brill. There was room in the exhibition calendar, but it soon became clear, due to another major project that would be monopolizing staff resources in 2010, that this exhibition needed to run longer - 10 months. So that’s when I suggested that the exhibition be presented in two-parts.This would meet the scheduling need AND allow me to expand the number of artists and works included.

Once the project received initial approval, I was able to begin travel for studio visits in the summer of 2008. During these visits, which included travel to Anchorage, Montreal, and Toronto, I was able to spend time with the artists learning about their work, discussing the concept for the exhibition, and in some cases, selecting specific works for inclusion. Some of the artists, such as Kelliher-Combs and Michael Belmore agreed at that time to create specific work for the exhibition. My last visit was in winter of 2009, when I was invited as a “visiting curator” to a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, which included Sarah Sense. She was using her time in the residency to create her new work for the exhibition.

One of the most exciting opportunities we had was to sponsor the creation of a new series of “Cyborg Hybrids” by KC Adams. Each of her previous photographic series was focused on the Native arts community of a different Canadian urban center (i.e. Winnipeg Series, Ottawa Series). For HIDE, we supported KC’s travel to New York in April 2009 to create the first US-based series of portraits, using individuals from Native arts community of New York City. Selections from this New York Series were included in the exhibition and two of these works were acquired for the museum’s collection.

An exhibition catalogue was considered from the beginning of the exhibition’s development. I knew that the conceptual nature of the exhibition, as well as the potential for deeper exploration of the issues, made a catalogue necessary. My previous exhibition, “Off the Map,” had been developed within a very compressed timeframe, so we were limited in the number of guest authors and essays we could include. With HIDE I was determined to have an individual essay for each of the “solo installation” artists (Kelliher-Combs, Myre, and Belmore), as well as my contextual essay, one for the photography section (Sarah Sense, Terrance Houle, Arthur Renwick, Rosalie Favell and KC Adams), and a more theoretical essay.

Over the months following my studio visits, I followed up frequently with the artists to finalize the objects selected, and worked with our staff here in New York and DC to plan the installation, write and edit the exhibition script, plan the public programs, and complete the editing and design of the catalogue. The whole process, by necessity, is very collaborative and we’re very lucky to have so many smart and talented individuals at the museum who work together to make these projects happen.

CP: What was your experience through the process of choosing the theme, the artists, and the artwork for the exhibit? What was your experience collaborating with each of the artists that made up the exhibit? How did each of the artists and their artwork help to support and contribute to the vision you had for the HIDE: Skin As Material and Metaphor theme?

KAM: I find projects like this one extremely rewarding because it is really a process of learning and exploration. The studio visits allow me to gain a deeper understanding of each of the artist’s work, both by having the opportunity to see new work and work that hasn’t been exhibited or published, and through more involved and lengthy conversations with the artists. A phone call does not give you the access or insight you gain through spending an afternoon with an artist looking at their work together, seeing their work space and materials, or sharing a meal together. I arrive with certain basic ideas about how their work might fit into my theme, but this is an iterative process. I don’t want to be too rigid and often adjust my ideas based on what I learn from the artist, and from other colleagues, during the development process.

This time also allows me an opportunity to gain a rapport with the artists and build a shared understanding of how their work will be represented in the exhibition. This is only the beginning of our communication process. Depending on the complexity of their installation, we may even bring them in to New York to see the gallery space and meet with our staff, especially our exhibition designer, to determine how we will install their work, or provide support for any site-specific work.

CP: What was your experience working with Sonya on the HIDE project? Did Sonya create work especially for this exhibit or was there work already created that you had seen that you found particularly fitting for the exhibit? Do you have plans to collaborate with Sonya on projects in the future?

KAM: I had a wonderful time working with Sonya on the HIDE project. I had first met her in 2007 at the Eiteljorg Museum, and followed up with her to arrange a studio visit at her home in Anchorage. She was extremely generous with her time with me, helping me with my arrangements, but also literally driving me all around the area for several days to meet with other Alaska Native artists and to see important art and cultural centers. She was also very organized and professional, which is always appreciated, and she worked collaboratively with our staff to plan a site-specific installation. Sonya is such an intelligent and talented artist, her work greatly enriched the exhibition and we are very pleased to have recently acquired some of her work for the NMAI collection. She continues to be my go-to contact for connecting with Alaska-Native artists and I’m sure we’ll have the opportunity to work together on projects in the future.

CP: How do you define Contemporary Native American/First Nations Art? Does Contemporary Native art need to be defined differently from mainstream art?

KAM: Contemporary Native American art is art made by a Native artist, if that artist chooses to be recognized as Native. Some artists don’t want to show their work in a Native art context and that is entirely their choice. The bottom line is that this work is part of the broader field of contemporary art. The details about the work (Native iconography or reference) are all part of interpretation, subject, style, etc., and don’t need to define the work in or out of Native art. It’s all art!

CP: There are many museums, galleries, grants, and residencies that require documentation of ancestry or tribal enrollment in order to apply or show in their programs. What are your thoughts on using the blood quantum system as a means to determine indigenous identity? Do you think there is a better system that could be used? What are some of the pros and cons when using the government standards for tribal enrollment?

KAM: I wish that art curators did not need to get involved in identity politics. I have personal opinions about the blood quantum pedigree system, but I am obligated to follow the policies of my employer. As a curator of Native art, I look for authenticity in the artist’s approach, at their biography, and other subjective factors. It is rare that I begin looking at the work of an artist who isn’t somehow connected to the larger Native arts community, so I’m not too concerned about frauds.

CP: Can you recommend another curator that we should interview for this blog in the future?

KAM: I would recommend Ryan Rice (Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe).

Curator Biography

Kathleen Ash-Milby is an Associate Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York. A member of the Navajo Nation, she earned her master of arts from the University of New Mexico in Native American art history. She worked as an independent curator, writer, and consultant on numerous contemporary art exhibitions and was the curator and co-director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City from 2000–05. At NMAI she organized the exhibitions HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor (2010) and Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination (2007). She was the co-curator, with Truman Lowe, for Edgar Heap of Birds: Most Serene Republics, a public art installation and collateral project for the 52^nd International Art Exhibition / Venice Biennale (2007). She served on the boards of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective (2007-2012), the American Indian Community House (2005-2007), and is currently the president of the Native American Art Studies Association.

Resources:

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/off_the_map/index.html

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/hide/

http://www.aich.org

Paul Chaat Smith - Comanche

wredstarresearchcenter — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 19:30:00 -0400

Interview by Eliza Gregory

Winter 2012

Paul Chaat Smith is a Comanche author, essayist, and curator. His books and exhibitions focus on the contemporary landscape of American Indian politics and culture. As an Associate Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, his projects have included the NMAI’s history gallery, performance artist James Luna’s Emendatio at the 2005 Venice Biennial, Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian (2008), and Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort (2009). With Robert Warrior, he is the author of Like a Hurricane: the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New Press, 1996), a standard text in Native studies and American history courses. His second book, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, was published in 2009 by the University of Minnesota Press, and is now in its second printing. An extended version of this bio can be found on his website, www.paulchaatsmith.com.

Paul Chaat Smith is incredibly fun to listen to. His ideas are exciting, refreshing, and never static. He breaks down the false barriers people perceive between Native and Non-Native American culture, even as he also acknowledges important differences between people and places. As he says in this interview, “I write to make sense of my own confusion.”

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/everything-you-know-about-indians-is-wrong

Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong, by Paul Chaat Smith, published by the University of Minnesota Press. This book is great.

Eliza Gregory: “Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong” strikes me as one of those books that can be revelatory for a lot of people—it certainly was for me. I felt like I was waking up a number of times as I read it. Has it had the sort of impact you hoped it would? And how have you become aware of its impact?

Paul Chaat Smith: I wasn’t sure whether it would be successful as a book, since it’s a collection of essays going back almost twenty years. I was confident that at least some of the essays would connect with readers, because of the response when they were originally published or presented. Overall I’m very pleased with the book’s impact. Lots of reviews, sold well for an academic title, and has become a required text for lots of intro Indian studies classes. (Which means lots of people not interested in art, much less Native art, are reading about our scene.) Sometimes I think if I hadn’t relied so much on existing essays on perhaps too many different topics, I might have been able to write a more cogent book that might have crossed over and reached a much larger audience. At the same time, if it reads as revelatory for some readers it’s because it was revelatory for me when I wrote it. For example, I don’t think “On Romanticism,” which I wrote in the early 1990s, would have read the same way if I had substantially revised it in 2009 for the book. I’ve lived with those ideas for twenty years now; they aren’t fresh to me and today I don’t even agree with some of them. Which is okay, I think. On my first web site, the tag line was “Art, politics, and honest confusion.” I write to make sense of my own confusion. Which often makes me even more confused!

EG: You’ve had a few different professional incarnations. Why do you think that being a curator fits you so well? What makes coming at some of these ideas through art more satisfying to you than coming at them from other fields?

PCS: For me, writing and curating are mostly the same enterprise. I see my job as something like a talk show host, someone who stages an interesting conversation. Which is odd, since I’m not an extroverted personality, quite the opposite. The magical thing is that you discover other people are thinking about the same questions you are, and you don’t feel so crazy or so alone. I ended up writing about art because the Indian political world had become tiresome, and it seemed to me that artists were asking the most interesting questions. Also, better parties.

Curating fits me because curating is a dubious, mostly invented profession, with no firm requirements and elastic definitions. Good for someone who never graduated from college!

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/emendatio/jamesluna.html

James Luna, rehearsal for Emendatio performance, National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C. 2005. Photo by Katherine Fogden.

EG: In the essay “Meaning of Life” you write, “In the years after Wounded Knee and before 1992, the Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham wrote, ‘I feel certain that I could address the entire world, if only I had a place to stand.’” How does that Jimmie Durham remark resonate for you at the moment?

PCS: Ah yes, one of the great lines of the 20^th century. The crossover dream, still unrealized, and these days JD’s quote resonates for me as both deeply and profoundly true, and still relevant as a strategic goal, yet very distant. I don’t see us any closer to building that platform, and am not sure what we’d say if we had the chance.

EG: In “After the Gold Rush” you write, “Walking in two worlds is ideological Vicodin, and because we’re the descendants of the greatest holocaust in human history, you can expect most of us to keep getting our prescription refilled for the foreseeable future.”

That statement really caught my attention, partly because it seemed so clear intellectually, but partly because I think I don’t understand it emotionally. I wonder if you would unpack the emotional aspect of that a little more for me—why does it feel easier to have two selves or two identities than one?

PCS: I think humans really like boxes. Look at Facebook, defining yourself by relationship status, favorite movies, books and music. A massive step backwards. Why do Indians embrace these particular boxes? I think because the Great Retraditionalization Project of the 1970s was largely built on essentialist Western ideas about race and authenticity. There is something so childlike, so intentionally stupid about this formula, which I am certain never came from us, ever. In fact, it is the opposite of what any truthful examination of our history would show. Life is complicated, and it becomes dishonest very quickly when anyone in 2012 convinces themselves their lives and experience can be reduced to discrete, separate worlds. It’s a sad, anthropological notion that holds us back. Cut it out, people!

EG: For your non-Native audience, how do you negotiate the need to instruct about the history and context in which the art is operating so that the audience can engage fully with the work? I imagine there is some tension between wanting people to really understand what is being communicated, and being wary of reverting to an info-panel-laden natural history museum style of presentation.

PCS: In my experience, the question of differences between Native and non-Native audience knowledge and expectations is overrated. The Indian audience is incredibly diverse, even if we are only talking about U.S. Indians visiting NMAI in Washington. Some people imagine that Indians automatically have deep knowledge about Indian history and culture. Well, that’s certainly not true, even if you are only talking about their own tribe. Most Indian visitors to NMAI in Washington have never even heard of several tribes who have their own exhibits, and this includes me, so the common presumption that Indian visitors would read those exhibits differently than non-Indians doesn’t make sense.

Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, which I curated with Truman Lowe in 2008, was one example where there was a difference, because lots of Indian visitors of a certain age remembered the 1970s and understood how Scholder’s Indian series was as shocking as the Sex Pistols, especially to Indians. Non-Indian visitors would probably not read them as shocking. But few Indian visitors knew Scholder’s story or work in detail, so it didn’t change how we organized the exhibit.

Exhibition brochure from Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian, an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, curated by Truman Lowe and Paul Chaat Smith, 2008.

EG: How do you deal with displaying objects? How do you navigate the awkwardness of utilizing objects that may have been acquired unethically, or which have a weighty history of being represented in a context (like a natural history museum) that you want to move away from?

PCS: One way Jolene Rickard and I wanted to deal with this for the history exhibit at NMAI was to give detailed information on objects, not on who made them and what they were for, but what happened to them after they left the hands of their makers. Discovered by Tomb Raider so and so, starred in this exhibit in London, and that one in Antwerp, bought by another collector in 1951, donated to NMAI in 1998, stored in a nice container in Suitland, had regular visitors….like that. Or, sacred pipe, sold to border town pawn shop to pay for booze. Still a good idea!

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/jungen/works.html#shapeshifter

Brian Jungen, “The Prince” 2006. Baseball gloves and dress form. 82 x 24 x 19.5 in. Included in the show “Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort” at the National Museum of the American Indian, 2009-2010. Coutesy of the Sender Collection; photo Adam Reich, courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, NY.

EG: Why do you think artists like Brian Jungen are able to cross over into the mainstream art world as a huge success? How are some people able to avoid being pigeonholed as “Native” artists?

PCS: Don’t you wish there were more people on that list? Too big a question to answer here!

EG: Do you ever feel pigeonholed as a curator? Are there shows you have wanted to do that you couldn’t because you are seen as having a particular, “Native” focus?

PCS: Not so much. I’ve written catalog text for two non-Indian artists: Baco Ohama and Maggie Michael. One goal my contemporary art colleagues at NMAI have is for the institution to organize exhibits that include non-Indians, which hasn’t happened yet. But there’s nothing to prevent us from doing that on our own time.

EG: What lessons do you think the National Museum of the American Indian has learned already, as an institution, since opening at its current location in 2004?

PCS: We learned that nobody cares about process. We thought people (and critics) would be fascinated about our collaborations with Native communities; they weren’t. People like narrative. And people don’t want to feel overwhelmed with too much information, too many objects, and too much repetition. The new boss, Kevin Gover, has charted a new direction which sees NMAI’s role as emphasizing history; and the ways contact created the world we live in today; that we are part of a common history and shared experience; and how Indians in the U.S. continue to have a unique relationship with the federal government.

Perhaps bigger than those things is the recognition that the building will be around for a century or more, and we don’t have to do everything at once. It’s like in 2004 we thought we had a six month lease or something.

EG: And what is something that you have learned so far, in your role as a curator there?

PCS: Text is, by far—and I mean really, really far, like the distance between Earth and Jupiter—the least important part of an exhibit. Also, that The Simpsons is a terrific model for exhibits on the National Mall, because, like the demographic for that show, our audience ranges from humans too young to speak, to others too old to walk, to dullards and geniuses and everything in between. Why is The Simpsons the best show in the history of television? Because they keep everyone watching, mixing slapstick physical humor with quips about Jonathan Franzen, Adlai Stevenson, and Frank Gehry. This is what I learned from Jimmie Durham and Matt Groening, always make work for people smarter than yourself. It sounds mystical and isn’t easy, but the best way to make sure you aren’t boring your audience is to not bore yourself.

EG: What is a question you really enjoy being asked?

PCS: Do you think there will ever be a Replacements reunion? And if there was, would it be any good?

EG: What’s the best curatorial work you’ve seen this year?

PCS: 2012 is not even two months old but promising. I’ll go with Super Bowl XLVI, President Obama’s State of the Union message, and Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum.

EG: What are you working on now?

PCS: Who wants to know?

EG: What other Native artists and curators do you recommend we interview for the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists database and blog?

PCS: Richard William Hill and Wendy Red Star.

Paul Chaat Smith: Further Resources

Paul Chaat Smith’s website: http://www.paulchaatsmith.com/

A video Q&A between PCS and Jason Weideman of Minnesota Press:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1bdC1y9llw

Sonya Kelliher-Combs - Iñupiaq, Athabascan

wredstarresearchcenter — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:21:00 -0400

Interviewed by Chela Perley

Winter 2012

Sonya Kelliher-Combs is a prolific artist that creates compelling and unique artwork. Her work stood out to me when I was looking in the HIDE: Skin As Material and Metaphor publication that was one of many books available to introduce us to contemporary indigenous artists and curators. As I was deciding which artist to choose, I visited Sonya’s website and was so taken with her work, I knew immediately I wanted to interview her. Like Sonya, I was born and raised in Alaska. I grew up in direct and indirect contact with the indigenous people of Alaska as well as the artwork. As a child and on into adulthood both contemporary and traditional Alaska Native artwork was a natural part of the landscape and in my day to day world in Anchorage where I lived. I saw totem poles, basketry, beadwork, clothing, dolls, drums, ivory and fossil bone carvings, jewelry, masks, paintings, weaving, and wood carvings. Only now am I aware of what a rich heritage I was exposed to and living in the midst of being raised in Alaska. Sonya has taken elements of traditional artwork and practices as well as items from day to day living transforming them into a captivating body of contemporary work unlike anything else I’ve seen. She addresses issues such as abuse, addiction, and suicide within her community. Using elements of subsistence living and harvesting, and she explores her multicultural identity in her artwork. I have found her to be a deeply committed and talented artist and as such, very busy! I would like to thank Sonya for taking the time out of her hectic schedule to participate in this interview.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Guarded Secrets, 2005, walrus stomach, porcupine quill and nylon thread.

Chela Perley: I have read that you were born and raised in Alaska. Would you please tell us about your background and how you got interested in making art?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: Growing up I did not think I would be an artist but was always doodling and making things. It wasn’t until I took a class at the University of Alaska Fairbanks that I realized it was much more than a hobby to me.

Chela Perley: Having been born and raised in Alaska myself, I have an understanding of how remote the community of Nome is, along with the extremes of the seasons and as such, the extremes of dark and light during the seasons. I am very interested to know how you feel growing up in Nome in these unique conditions and how they may have influenced your life and artwork.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: The sense of light and dark as a condition was not something I gave much thought to growing up. These were just different times of the year to do different things. It wasn’t until I lived away from Alaska that the light began to affect me and I understood how much of an impact it had on me. Today there are times, almost like an internal clock, in which I want to bead, sew, fish or berry pick, and make art.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Unraveling Secrets, 2005

Chela Perley: How did your relationships with your family and friends in such an isolated, close-knit community influence your life as a whole and in turn your artwork?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: Growing up in Nome we understood that you never drove by someone in need. That simple lesson is one that I carry today. People within our community took care of each other, if a hunter had passed away others provided for his family. We never threw something away that might be needed later. I remember working a summer job at the Nome Convention and Visitors Center and hearing visitors say how much junk was lying around people’s homes. Several years later my husband and I used all the stuff stored around my parent’s property to outfit a small studio apartment to live in, including, fridge, bathtub, and a 1950’s sink from my Grandparents home. Growing up in such a place makes one think and look at things differently. It was a wonderful way to grow up and I am very happy I had this experience it will always influence the work I make and the way I live.

Chela Perley: How has living and working in Anchorage, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Alaska, changed and influenced your life and work after having grown up in Nome? What brought you to Anchorage?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: A very common quote is that ‘Anchorage is Alaska’s largest village.’ It is in a sense. There are more Alaska Natives in Anchorage than any other community in Alaska. If you had asked me in 1992 if I would move to Anchorage I would have said ‘No way’, but after going to graduate school in Tempe, Arizona I realized Anchorage is not really that big. Living in Anchorage has enabled me to live and work as an artist. It has allowed for many opportunities to do volunteer work and sit on committees and boards that I think are doing important work locally, statewide, and nationally. We moved here for two reasons. First my husband worked out in the field when we lived in Nome, we spent more time apart than together. Second, I wanted to do my work full-time and in Nome that was not feasible, I would need a second job. Many of my family live in Anchorage and as you probably know lots of people come through Anchorage so I don’t feel lonely for people from Nome. What I do often miss is the land, tundra and beauty of our region but I can always go home for a visit.

Sonya Kelliher-combs, Unraveled Gray Secrets, 2005, stretched walrus stomach dipped in acrylic paint

Chela Perley: I have read that many of the exhibits you have created speak to your multicultural identity and your relationship to the place you grew up in and who you are as person. Your work has often addressed issues that you have been directly and indirectly affected by such as suicide and abuse. How has your art making helped you to express yourself as a person and as a member of your community? Do you feel your process has helped you to heal and how do you feel it has helped others to heal?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: Creating work that addresses difficult issues like suicide, abuse, and marginalization of populations is not always easy. The essential part, to me, is to make work that is true and honest. Sometimes creating this work is cathartic. Sometimes it feels like cutting out a piece of cancer, but most often it is quite and a time to contemplate. Often people have told me how my work has affected them. I can only hope that this work shows people that they are not alone and that these painful issues must be voiced in order to transform and promote healing.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Goodbye, 2007

Chela Perley: I am interviewing Kathleen Ash-Milby for the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists blog. What was your experience working with Kathleen on the HIDE: Skin As Metaphor and Material project and with her in general as a curator of contemporary indigenous art? What was your experience working with the others artists that were invited to participate in the HIDE exhibition?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: Kathleen Ash-Milby is an amazing woman. I applaud her for the critical work she is doing within the field of Contemporary Indigenous Art and her ability to look and discuss it within the larger context of what we call Contemporary Art. I loved working with Kathleen, and was very thankful to be a part of HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor. I am honored to have exhibited with these talented artists, artists I think are doing important work. HIDE has bridged Indigenous Artists and Scholars from all across North America and fostered a much-needed dialogue speaking to issues of Hide/Skin. Living and working in Alaska as an artist is often like living in a bubble. Every opportunity I have to work with other artists and scholars is a welcome opportunity.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Small Secrets, 2009, walrus stomach, human hair, glass bead, nylon thread

Chela Perley: How did the HIDE project fit with the work you have been making and exhibiting during or before that time period? Kathleen said in my interview with her that you created work especially for this exhibit. Would you talk about what your inspiration and process was for the work you created?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: Kathleen approached me to create works for HIDE based on a previous body of work. The pieces in HIDE are an expansion of these ideas. The work I create is inspired by the relationship of our ancestors to their environment — how they used skin, fur, and membrane in material culture. As an artist born of mixed descent — Iñupiaq, Athabascan, Irish, and German — I chronicle the struggle for self-definition and identity. My medium is skin, the surface by which an individual mediates their socio-cultural experience and reality. I examine the relationship and melding of Alaska Native and Western cultures. I strive to create works that address these issues.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Idiot Strings, 2005

Chela Perley: What has been some of the artwork you have created that has held the most meaning for you as an artist and why? What are the current projects you are working on?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: We have one work of mine in our personal collection. It is a mixed media painting called Idiot Strings. It is the first work I created in that series, Idiot Strings, strings that tether mittens to their wearer are memorials to generations of Alaska Natives affected by suicide. It also was my first successful ‘paint skin’ work, synthetic skins made out of acrylic polymer.

I curated an exhibition from the Anchorage Museum Collection in 2007, Con-Census. It was a very rewarding experience. My intention for curating this exhibition was to create a show that addressed many issues close to my heart. In working on this exhibition it became clear that, with the items I selected, I had something to say. As single objects they might speak softly about history, culture, family, and the life of our people. But collectively they could speak loudly about the abuse, marginalization, commodification, and struggle of a people. I created an exhibition that questioned and challenged the perception of these functional objects selected from the Anchorage Museum of History and Art collection. My goal was to present a conceptual installation that is unconventional, a personal exploration of the transformative power of these utilitarian objects.

Currently I am working on an exhibition called ‘Where they Overlap’ for the Gorman Gallery at the University of California at Davis, which opens April 2012. Upcoming exhibitions include True North: Contemporary Art of the Circumpolar North, which will open at the Anchorage Museum in May 2012. I will also be participating as an artist aboard an expedition along coastal Alaska in the summer of 2013, which looks at the issue of marine debris in Alaska and globally. Materials gathered will be used in a group exhibition of artists and scientists which will be exhibited at the Anchorage Museum in 2013 and will travel throughout the Smithsonian’s Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES).

Sonya Kelliher-combs, Sea Lion Brand with Blue, 2009, sea lion skin/fur with nylon thread

Chela Perley: Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: As an undergraduate student I fought against the stereotype and title of Alaska Native Artist. I refused to use those terms. At some point, years later, I understood that I could not and did not want to deny my cultural background and how essential it is to the work I create, although the cultures I come from are not the only inspiration I draw from. I do not like the limitation that these titles pose but like in many other fields I understand the need to list and categorize. I think of artists like Judy Chicago and the Feminist Art Movement and how this work fits in the larger field of Contemporary Art and hope that one day the art world opens to all that Contemporary Native Art has to offer and say.

Chela Perley: Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

Sonya Kelliher-Combs: Susie Silook, Nicholas Galanin, Erica Lord, Da-ka xeen Mehner, Teri Rofkar

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Common Thread, 2008–10, reindeer and sheep rawhide, nylon thread

Artist Biography

Sonya Kelliher-Combs was raised in the Northwest Alaska community of Nome. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree is from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Master of Fine Arts is from Arizona State University. Through her mixed media painting and sculpture, Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context. Her combination of shared iconography with intensely personal imagery demonstrates the generative power that each vocabulary has over the other. Similarly, her use of synthetic, organic, traditional and modern materials moves beyond oppositions between Western/Native culture, self/other and man/nature, to examine their interrelationships and interdependence while also questioning accepted notions of beauty. Kelliher-Combs’ process dialogues the relationship of her work to skin, the surface by which an individual is mediated in culture.

Kelliher-Combs’ work has been shown in numerous individual and group exhibitions in Alaska and the contiguous United States, including the national exhibition Changing Hands 2: Art without Reservation and the international exhibition Arts from the Arctic. In 2007, Kelliher-Combs was awarded the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art and is a recipient of the 2005 Anchorage Mayors Arts Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Anchorage Museum, Alaska State Museum, University of Alaska Museum of the North, and the Eiteljorg Museum. Kelliher-Combs currently lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska. As an Alaska Native artist and advocate, she serves on the Alaska Native Arts Foundation Exhibitions Committee, Alaska State Council on the Arts Visual Arts Advisory, and Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Arts Board. She volunteers and donates her expertise and art to numerous organizations and individuals. It is her goal and mission to bring awareness, to educate, and to perpetuate the arts and traditions of the many diverse cultures of Alaska. Current exhibitions include Hide at the National Museum of American Indian Art, New York, NY and THIS IS DISPLACEMENT: Native Artists Consider the Relationship Between Land and Identity a traveling exhibition.

http://www.sonyakellihercombs.com/

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/hide/

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/hide/sonya.cfm

http://www.eiteljorg.org/

References:

http://fellowship.eiteljorg.org/#fellows::ArtistProfile?value=74

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/hide/sonya.cfm

http://artsceneak.net/vl06su05.htm

http://artsceneak.net/vl04su02.htm

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/native-anew/Content?oid=1091092

http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/endicott_redux/arts/page/11/

Ryan Rice - Mohawk

wredstarresearchcenter — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 05:06:00 -0400

Interviewed by Elizabeth Neal

Winter 2012

Ryan Rice, a Mohawk of Kahnawake, Quebec, is co-founder of both Nation to Nation, a First Nations art collective, and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. Though originally from Canada, he has curated exhibits in a variety of venues throughout North America and has been the Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe since 2009. An artist himself, he sees his curatorial work as politically important because, as he says, “Indigenous art and artists are still subjected to the peripheries of the mainstream.”

Elizabeth Neal: You have said that your expectations for the First Nations art collective Nation to Nation was “as a catalyst for Indigenous creative expression.” How does creating spaces for art and community inspire artistic output?

Ryan Rice: Community is key to cultural continuity. By including or thinking of aspects of community in arts-related projects, whether they are curatorial or hands-on/participatory, the means of expression can become validated and integral to strengthen links between historical memory and tradition with contemporary constructions and understandings of the beaux-arts and its profound effect of maintaining and expanding knowledge systems.

EN: Beyond educating the public about the effects of the St. Lawrence Seaway on Kahnawake environment and culture, what consequences did you desire or anticipate from your project with Sondra Cross and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, At the Water’s Edge/Project: Seaway? Any specific action from non-Native people?

RR: Nation To Nation was a “local/urban” collective based in Montreal that functioned without and/or beyond boundaries, therefore determined to reach out to native and non-native communities (urban and reserve) to socialize/interact within a creative art-focused milieu. The concept, which was reliant on presenting art within an “event” inclusive of a diverse community, shifted the dominant/hierarchal structures built within an institutional space such as a museum or gallery. The social element of engaging with the creative process – art, performance, music and food – provided a welcoming atmosphere and gave way to a greater emphasis on the interaction with the artwork presented.

Building an audience or community for art and those who appreciate or can learn to appreciate art in all its complexities is just as important to developing the venue or finding that space. Occupying or claiming space in the artistic landscape is critical for native artists, curators, writers etc. to build in order for them to get their work recognized on many levels. Nation To Nation was creating that “space” as a catalyst for Indigenous arts/artists to be present and productive. Nation to Nation invited artists to respond, imagine, and consider themes, concerns etc., that were relevant to their communities, society and themsleves. The formation of native art collectives continue to contribute widely to a native art history and are necessary because many art spaces have institutional limitations and prejudices.

The project Atsa’kta: By The Water’s Edge, was a means to locate, recognize and reclaim the proper place for the Mohawk community named Kahnawake, a Mohawk word which translates to ‘by the river.’ The project considered public space as an interactive environment and a critical juncture to rekindle nostalgia, political action/inaction and Kahnawake’s identity in the face of what was considered a pioneering marvel – the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Atsa’kta: At The Water’s Edge

“On the banks of the mighty St. Lawrence, stands a village real proud of its name…” crooned The Mighty Mohawks, a 4-piece country and western show band led by Kahnawakero:non George Hill. The song stirs echoes of times gone by and memorializes the state of the Mohawk Nation, Kahnawake in its just place. By 1959, Kahnawake faced more than an identity crisis because the shoreline, “by the rapids,” was eradicated forever. The St. Lawrence Seaway, regarded as a modern engineering marvel by Western standards, made way for international shipping possible along long utilized river routes that reach from the Atlantic Ocean to the interior of Turtle Island in the Great Lakes. The construction of the seaway, from 1954 to 1959, reduced Kahnawake’s land base by expropriating 1,262 acres that severed the community’s access to the river. The “SEAWAY” has since become a critical point in Kahnawake’s history as well as a historical symbol that acts as a reminder of an idyllic past, the maintenance of boundaries as well a conduit that encouraged a rise in the political will of the community’s traditionalist and nationalist movement. The late Peter Diome called the construction “usurpation,” “trespassing”, and a violation of treaty rights (Montreal Star, Apr.24/56, 5:1; Montreal Gazette, Jun.2/56,23:5). The international route was a direct attack on the community’s heart, a place where the town gathered to work and play. The Seaway was a serious affront to Kahnawake’s identity and “posed a threat to Kahnawakero:non by tearing through the site of Mohawk economic and cultural activity – the Riverfront.” (Audra Simpson 1996:37). The eradication of the riverside and all it represented created a lasting impression on the community and its collective memory. Our place, “by the rapids,” continues to encompass tradition, identity and a history that still exists and shared in memories.

Atsa’kta: At The Water’s Edge identifies the fifty-year anniversary of the development of the seaway. It can be acknowledged as a catalyst to instill important lessons for future generations on political and cultural relationships and is another milestone to Kahnawake’s complex history. Nation To Nation’s project on public display emphasizes the importance of cultural continuity in relation to the intrusion of St. Lawrence Seaway explored through art, archival materials collaged onto didactic panels, to create visual encounters informed by the curator (Ryan Rice) and artists (Sondra Cross and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito). Such an experience provides insight for a younger generation’s comprehension of the magnitude of the construction/destruction, and allows the older generations collective memory to be experienced.

Visit Sakwannati’s page - http://www.skawennati.com/watersedge/index.html

The project was selected and funded by the local credit union’s (Caisse Populaire Kahnawake) community project fund. The sites (by the water’s edge) were selected because of the history they hold within the community. The first site (panel designed by Sondra Cross) is located at the Onake Canoe Club, adjacent to Johnson’s beach. This site is mostly connected to sport and leisure and is just a shy distance from the seaway. The second site (designed by Skawennati) is located behind the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, just a stones throw away to the seaway, and is a central location to Kahnawake and the seaway’s history.

The sites proved to be strategically successful as they are located in somewhat high-traffic areas and are accessible to both local and non-locals. The goal of the project was to create awareness to Kahnawake’s history by educating younger generations and visitors of this recent event (50 years), and at the same time, reminding others of the central connection Kahnawakeronon still have with the river and seaway.

EN: Your exhibit ANTHEM: Perspectives on Home and Native Land presented Canadian artists’ views and concerns about nationhood. Did you hope that it would resonate widely: with non-Canadians, Euro-Canadians, and First Nations people? Or did you have a target audience in mind?

RR: The exhibition was specific, yet broadly considered, to resonate with people’s perception of nationhood, land, and home. It challenged the colonial project or nation-state’s dominion of conquest and rule. I was interested to know how others beyond the status quo fit into this picture. It included a diverse group of artists, who lay claim to Canada as their home. At the same time, Anthem considered each artists distinct perspective that challenged a narrow and often imposed nationalistic viewpoint of a Canadian citizen through issues related to economics, faith, race, sexuality, territory, belonging, legislation and ownership. The exhibition traveled across Canada to four galleries and was seen by a diverse audience.

Fastwurms (Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse), FLAG, 2007 (detail)

EN: What criteria do you use to select which artists’ work will be most effectively combined for a given exhibit?

RR: The selection of work goes hand in hand with the type of exhibtion/project being developed. Sometimes much is dependent on the space available, whether I’m working with a gallery/musuem or without — a proposal that will lead to an exhibition. In most cases the selection of artists is based on the curatorial premise of the exhibition (concepts, issues raised), or a certain art work that inspires. Once that seed (idea or artwork) is planted, locating artists and negotiating for their loan of art work begins. There really is no linear criteria or checklist I follow - it is all dependent on how artwork supports the construction of concepts. Works are selected that “speak” to the principle of the exhibition and then consideration of how each relate or interact / converse with / against each other within the space.

Aside from selecting works available, an artists’ process, body of work, style, philosophy and intent is sometimes key when considering their work for exhibitions. Artists can be invited to “respond” to the framework of the exhibition or commissioned by creating new work for specific projects. Biography, geography, culture, and gender are considered at times too. The curatorial process is also an editing exercise due to the reality of many circumstances that need to be factored in the bigger picture – space, funding, media/tech requirements, size, conservation, access, loans, shipping/crating etc., however the general intent is shaped around the artwork.

EN: Last summer you gave a lecture at the Denver Botanic Gardens entitled “Site Seen: Native Art in Public Spaces.” Atsa’kta: At the Water’s Edge clearly projected Native art into public space in a highly informative way. What elements do you look for in an exhibition space? Is the community it is located in important? If so, what means do you employ to bring nearby residents into the space?

RR: Location will determine community, and sometimes vice versa. If a project is developed with a specific community in mind, then location is critical and needs to be accessible. If said location/community does not have “space,” then site needs to be determined – is it public or private, established or DYI?

Locating space and sizing out the capacity is crucial to developing exhibitions, however, it is a luxury that is not always a reality. Institutional space (museums and public galleries) have limitations – mandates, programming schedules, interest – and usually, implementing or trying to insert a “native” voice or presence can be a challenge as these instutions also place emphasis on a Western purview/measurement of the arts. Alternative spaces are certainly available but does not necessarily support an exhibitions intent due to the lack of any infrastructure. In our own communities (reserve/reservation), exhibition space and/or support for such space aside from established cultural centers is lacking. Commercial galleries is a whole other beast. The spaces determined for and/or occupied by contemporary native art are limited, yet have the potential to be active and engaging with a wide spectrum of society.

Atsa’kta: At The Water’s Edge

EN: How would you say your background as an artist affects your communications with artists, if at all? Do you see your work as a curator, assembling and managing exhibitions, as an art form in itself?

RR: I consider process and the hands-on experience of art-making as supportive to my curatorial practice. I appreciate how an artist thinks and negotiates and I consider myself a mediator fostering everything between supporting an artists production and up to the presentation. I am open to dialogue and willing to accommodate artists’ ideas, suggestions that will enhance and support the exhibition when in development and need to be able to negotiate and be strategic when making decisions in all aspects of the project. The role of a curator (in my reality and many others) is predominately administrative once the basis of the project/proposal is developed. Multi-tasking and organizing skills are crucial and fluctuate from exhibition to exhibition. I’m not sure if it is an art form in itself but the work certainly is extensively crafted …and you can tell by the outcome. Research and travel (studio visits/lecture etc.) are not always supported but necessary.

EN: You have curated exhibits in both America and Canada. How do the experiences differ? What would you say about the support given to artists, especially Indigenous artists, in both countries, both financially and creatively?

RR: The experience varies and I have been inclusive of artists from both nation-states. I also see the inclusion of global indigenous perspectives important to the development of the field and scholarship. Once you have inserted yourself in the “artistic” community the notion of geographical space collapses. The border (US/Canada) is a contentious space and many do not move across it (psychologically and physically). The role / impact and expectations of an artist and curator needs to constantly shift with the movement of the arts field. The colonial mind is very much alive as we see western artists claim space everywhere…we need to do the same. Locality is important but is also safe – and this often determines an artists’ impact as well as drive.

The US is a politically different place for native people than Canada even though they mirror each other very closely. The imposition of state and ironically oppressive inclusionary inventions of “melting pot” and “multiculturalism” has failed native people. The rejection of such legislation is key to moving forward and staking claim to supporting Native communities and patrimony. The cultural economy in each country is very different, which impacts an artist’s vision and intent.

(EN: Mr. Rice discusses this at greater length in the publication Visiting; a link to a pdf can be found in the “Resources” section at the end of the interview)

EN: What do you hope for the future of contemporary Indigenous art, both short term and long?

RR: Short – support and development of the infrastructure, which will build the foundation for long-term goals/presence through professional development and recognition for Indigenous curators, writers, art historian, arts administrators, preparators, conservators etc…

Dominant institutions representative of native collections and or projects need to recruit, invite, collaborate and support the development of the above. Internships, guest curator contracts, writing contracts etc…(beyond the tokenistic gestures they utilize for themselves.)

Accessibility for documentation and publication – building websites, disseminate and produce catalogues, incorporation of Native art history in curriculum as well as including native artists’ work in the surveys of American/Global art histories.

Long-Term: With the short term goals indicated, we can also build a critical mass and contribute extensively to the collections we do not own as a form of reclamation and scholarship, respect and care. We also need to foster support for artists career through collectors/collections, patronage beyond the anthropologic / ethnographic market, and build gallery/exhibition spaces to allow for experimentation and learning.

EN: In late 2011 you curated a solo exhibition for artist Mark Igloliorte called drift, which, according to Toronto Free Gallery promotional material, explored “an unresolved shift located somewhere between life and death.” How do you approach an exhibit of work centered on personal, spiritual themes rather than historical or national ones, such as ANTHEM: Perspectives on Home and Native Land and At the Water’s Edge? Or are these themes inseparable?

RR: The themes (suicide and isolation) for drift were universal, and I am conscious of this position in my practice. The exhibition framework cited/positioned Mark’s work in relation to a national epidemic of bullying and teenage suicide we witness in popular culture. The “It Gets Better” campaign gained attention to the issue through celebrity, however, the community it affected was limited. Mark’s work allowed me to pursue this situation in another way. His work was personal, yet shareable, respectful and impactful, allowing both of us (Mark and I) to consider and negotiate its presentation.

The premise to my exhibitions may seem restricted to some, but are very much accessible to everyone if they are open-minded and respectful of parallel histories and perspectives. The power of art and expression is what compels my practice, and yes can be inseparable of all facets you indicated.

Artist Mark Igloliorte skating his work - komatik and box before the drift exhibition opening (October 2011) at Toronto Free Gallery, Toronto, Ontario.

EN: There are many museums, galleries, grants, and residencies that require documentation of ancestry or tribal enrollment in order to apply or show in their programs. What are your thoughts on using the blood quantum system as a means to determine indigenous identity? Do you think there is a better system that could be used? What are some of the pros and cons when using the government standards for tribal enrollment?

RR: I think this is a communal decision (validation, belonging) as well as specific to a native nation’s political infrastructure / policy on membership. The theories of transnationalism, hybridization, and cosmopolitanism exist and work well for non-natives maneuvering across our territories and occupy our space – metaphorically, and for some opportunities - deceptively. In the face of colonial policies/standard of enrollment, our communities and nation(s) know us and can validate who we are through our relations.

EN: Can you recommend another curator that we should interview for this blog in the future?

RR: Visit the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective website to see members who are active in the field at many levels.

EN: Thank you!

Bio:

Ryan Rice, a Mohawk of Kahnawake, Quebec is an artist and curator. Rice received a Master of Arts degree in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and received an Associate of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has worked for the past 16 years within the museum/art gallery milieu as an educator and curator (assistant, guest, resident, fellow, independent and Chief) at various centres including the Iroquois Indian Museum, Indian Art Centre (INAC), Carleton University Art Gallery and the Walter Phillips Art Gallery. He has published articles in the periodicals – Canadian Art, Spirit, Fuse, Muse and Blackflash. Rice is also a co-founder and former director of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. Rice’s exhibitions include ANTHEM: Perspectives on Home and Native Land, Oh So Iroquois, Scout’s Honour, LORE, Hochelaga Revisited and ALTERNATION. In 2009, he joined the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts as Chief Curator.

-from www.iaia.edu

Resources:

For further information about Ryan Rice and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective can be found on the following websites:

http://www.aboriginalcuratorialcollective.org/

nancymariemithlo.com/Visitingbycontent-1.pdf

http://www.iaia.edu/museum/vision-project/authors/ryan-rice/

Daina Warren - Montana Cree

wredstarresearchcenter — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:43:00 -0400

Interview by Sharita Towne

Winter 2012

Daina Warren is a curator based in Winnipeg, Canada. She is currently Co- Director at Urban Shaman Gallery. One of the things that most struck me about Daina, and inspired me to reach out to her was the range of artists and shows she has put together, and her keen sense of description and introspection when delving into these works. Furthermore, she has accomplished all of this at a relatively young age! I figured there was a thing or two I could learn from Ms. Warren, and was honored she agreed to this interview.

Sharita Towne: Thank you for taking the time to do an interview with us. I want to start off by getting to know a bit about where you’re from, your family, and community. Has anyone in your family been an inspiration in your pursuing art?

Daina Warren: I am from the Montana Cree Nation located in Hobbema, Alberta. Many people in my family state that they are not artists per se (and I have the amazing situation of two families, my birth Native family and my adopted white family). But it’s because of them that I always felt their support and energy to take on a career in the arts. In my white family, my mother and father are really remarkable at designing and renovating houses; one of my brothers is a musician, and there are contemporary dancers and other musicians in the extended family. In my Native family, my birth mother and grandmother are both exceptional traditional beaders. They have made almost all of the regalia for the immediate family of my brothers, sisters, and cousins on the rez.

ST: You studied Studio Arts, and now it seems much of your creativity is channeled into your curatorial practices. When did you first get into curating?

DW: My first curatorial project was actually at Emily Carr University of Art & Design (back then it was known as Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design) while I was pursuing a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree for my own Visual Arts practice. I curated our student exhibition titled, Deconstructing the FirstNationsAboriginalNativeIndian in 2000. However, it was soon after I finished at ECUAD that I started working with grunt gallery, in that they hired me as a curatorial resident through Canada Council’s program, Grants to Aboriginal Curators for Residencies in the Visual Arts, and I worked with them from 2000 – 2001. I was then hired on permanently as curator and administrator. My curatorial experience developed because of the projects and people I met through grunt.

Kevin McKenzie, 426 Hemi, from “Don’t Stop Me Now,” curated by Daina Warren

ST: How would you categorize your curatorial practices? Or rather, do you have particular interests, or goals in mind?

DW: I would say my curatorial practice is categorized as Contemporary Aboriginal Art, although I think it should be viewed as a Contemporary Arts curator. However, I have always had a vested interest in curating Aboriginal art and artists. Working with Indigenous artists will always be on the forefront of my research for curatorial exhibitions. But I try to take on as many projects that include Indigenous and non- Indigenous artists. As for practices that I have always personally been drawn to included installation and sculpture works, but also performance art is another practice I learned quite a bit about, and once again, this was due to my curatorial experience at grunt gallery. For now my 3-5 year plan is to work with Urban Shaman and keep developing it into Canada’s leading Aboriginal Artist-Run Centre locally, nationally, and internationally. I definitely have some big plans for the gallery. After that, not exactly sure but I would eventually like to get back to Alberta as that is my home province, and there is a lot of work I would like to do around my family’s history, and possibly a PHD, but that is still a long way off yet.

Homepage to Traveling On our Breath, http://www.firstvisionart.com/daina/

ST: What do you find most challenging about your work as a curator?

DW: Critical and Curatorial writing is always a challenge for me, but the longer I have worked in the art system, it has been getting easier to try to explain ideas and concepts about artworks on paper. One thing that is the best challenge about the curatorial job is that there are no two similar projects, and it does take a lot of thinking on the spot to produce, install, or exhibit a project. A curator definitely has to be resourceful, and to quote Tom Hill, “Believe in the integrity of the artwork,” hearing and knowing that fact always helps me sustain mental energy for the production of a project.

ST: What have been some of your most memorable artist/curator collaborations?

Portage 007, Terrance Houle & Trevor Freeman

DW: Most of the exhibitions are quite memorable for different reasons. But definitely some of the craziest, or the ones that had me the most nervous, were some of the performance art projects. One particular example is Terrance Houle’s and Trevor Freeman’s project, Portage 007, where we guerilla styled their performance piece of portaging a canoe throughout the downtown area of Vancouver. We made our way from Portside Park in Coal Harbour over to Water Street, then down Robson Street to the Vancouver Art Gallery, then over again to Pacific Boulevard and walked around to Science World in the False Creek area. On top of it all, we managed to not get into any trouble with storeowners, the general public, or the police. Actually the police blocked off a street for us to cross. The police officer just drove up, he didn’t even get out of the car to ask us what we were up to, and once we were finished crossing, he drove off.

ST: How do you define Contemporary Native American/First Nations Art? Does Contemporary Native art need to be defined differently from mainstream art?

DW: Contemporary Native art shouldn’t have to be defined differently from mainstream art but at the moment there is still a relative lack of Aboriginal arts programming by institutions and art organizations. So until there is more general programming I believe there still exists a need to single out Indigenous artists and their projects so that both artists and curators are noticed for the work they do and have more opportunity to exhibit their projects. As for my own definition of Native art, that is quite hard to define, and I hope it never gets easy because that would mean that Native artists have been relegated to one category of definition or art making production. However, something interesting for me occurred lately, a collective I am currently working with is programming an art event, and while brainstorming our ideas, a particular concept emerged, a Cree language aesthetic. This term we came up with is quite exciting for me. What is a Cree language aesthetic? I would say the same for a Native aesthetic, most artworks that I have programmed have some aspect or the project is influenced by the individual’s cultural background and practices, so that is what a Native or Indigenous aesthetic means for me.

ST: There are many museums, galleries, grants, and residencies that require documentation of ancestry or tribal enrollment in order to apply or show in their programs. What are your thoughts on using the blood quantum system as a means to determine indigenous identity? Do you think there is a better system that could be used? What are some of the pros and cons when using the government standards for tribal enrollment?

DW: This is an interesting discussion because I just had this same situation brought up to me a couple of weeks ago in that at Universities in Canada, Aboriginal students have the option of declaring their identity. I had the same thing happen to me when I attended both Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and the University of British Columbia. In the past, I have declared my Cree background on my applications, though the first time I did, I wasn’t sure if I was credible as I am adopted by a non-Native family and at the time had just gotten my First Nations status registration. I didn’t want to be taking away resources from Aboriginal students who might have more need or be deserving of some special status at the educational institutes I had attended. Little did I know I was exactly the type of student they wanted to count as who was attending their schools. In Canada, we don’t really have to show our blood quantum on applications, we can just declare ourselves as First Nation’s background and that is usually enough for the funders or organizations. I am all for artists and students using whatever means and resources to further their careers. There are a lot of special options open to artists and curators in Canada, specialized programming and monies that non-Native arts community can’t access, and that does cause some envy amongst our non-Native colleagues, but for so long there was never much access for First Nations artists and curators to be part of the larger arts environment. It is about time we have some special opportunities to really exemplify the ideas and projects that we are currently interested in creating and producing.

ST: You work in one of only three Indigenous run galleries in Canada. Can you talk a bit about the curatorial climate, so to speak, of Contemporary Art in Canada?

DW: The curatorial climate is quite interesting in Canada, I have to apologize beforehand to other countries, but I think that because we can access specialized government arts grants, artists and especially Indigenous artists are supported to create their artwork and tend to be quite innovative with their ideas and practices.

For example the performance art practice is quite prevalent within Canadian arts programming. We have special programs and grants from Canada Council, which offers residencies to work with art institutions, programs like these offer first hand experience in the curatorial practice and has launched many careers. And this especially so with Artist-run centre culture, many emerging artists begin their careers through the smaller arts institutions.

ST: What is your approach to working with multiple audiences (cultural, generational, etc.) and whom do you consider your primary audience?

Rebecca Belmore - Rebecca Belmore, online curatorial project, hosted by grunt gallery, Vancouver, BC, www.rebeccabelmore.com

DW: I don’t have a definitive approach but one such project that I had to really work with a varied audience was during my exhibition at the National Art Gallery of Canada (Feb 2010 to July 2011). However, the NGC has certain standards about how to present information on artworks, and I followed their formats for didactic and publicity materials. Usually, I tend toward a more personal and one-on-on approaches when trying to engage an audience. My curatorial talks are more personable rather then using heady art lingo that tends to lose people if they don’t have that language to understand the artwork. I consider my primary audience both the arts communities that I work within, and the outlying public that has some connection to those locales, e.g. grunt gallery’s community in Vancouver, British Columbia; the NGC’s art community and the Ottawa public, and now Urban Shaman’s membership and Winnipeg, Manitoba. However, I do hope to engage a national and international audience in the works that I have produced over the years.

ST: What do you consider most important when writing curatorial statements? I have read some of your statements, and I find that “Postscript 18 - A Container for New Life and Death” is a good example of how attentive and poetic you can be in your inspection of Contemporary Aboriginal Art. What do you consider most important when pulling together the words to speak about these works of art?

DW: That particular writing is quite funny and now having not read it in quite some time I want to edit it like mad. But I did try at the time to be a little more poetic than usual, and yet I have a feeling that wasn’t quite what Artspeak was looking for. But I had fun thinking about that project, it was hard to not be poetic with her piece, it was very ethereal. Like I mentioned previously it took a long time for me to excel at writing but entering into my Master program really helped me formulate and research my own writing. Some of the pieces that I am really happy with are the pieces in which I have a long history of knowing an artist’s work, for example, Terrance Houle and the piece I wrote for his video project that we installed at Galerie SAW Gallery during the Art Star 4 Video Art Biennial: Friend or Foe Ottawa. But I also really enjoy the process of co-writing, specifically my essay that I co-wrote with Carla Taunton for our curatorial performance art project titled, Acting Out, Claiming Space for Modern Fuel in Kingston, Ontario last year, February 2011.

ST: You are Co-Director at Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg. What recent works and approaches in presenting them (artworks) to the public do you find particularly fresh and exciting at Urban Shaman Gallery? What are you working on now?

Above works left to right: “Shaman Rider” by Norval Morriseau; “Fertility Totem” by Joseph Sanchez; “Thunderbird Woman” by Daphne Odjig; “Flack” by Jackson Beardy and Jakie Travers. Photo posted with permission from Amber-Dawn Bear Robe and Daina Warren

DW: I just started working at Urban Shaman last summer; I have just hit the six-month mark starting this February. I think what’s really fresh and exciting for me is that I now have the chance to become a director of a gallery. I have usually been the assistant to the director in most respects, and I am really excited to start implementing my own programming and projects. I have now worked in artist run centre culture for almost twelve years now, but this is an amazing opportunity that I am very happy about, plus Winnipeg is now a major contender in the national arts and cultural arena of Canada, I heard its number 2 next to Vancouver. The community here is very prolific in their art production too, which makes for an interesting and vibrant community. I am currently working on executing the programming that my co-Director Amber-Dawn Bear Robe has programmed. Urban is seriously booked until April 2014, and we are constantly getting project proposals, which is amazing and disappointing as we have to turn a lot of projects away at the moment. But that 2014 date will come around fast, so I am already researching the next three years of programming right now (Canada Council requests that organizations program three years into the future, the reasoning for this is based on multi-year funding, once your approved your approved for three years.)

ST: Can you recommend another curator that we should interview for this blog in the future?

Video Still, Dana Claxton, here eyes have seen many worlds, 2005. From “Cosmologies: anything that exists has a beginning” curated by Daina Warren

DW: Other curators who I am sure you probably already have in your sights would be Candice Hopkins, Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Lori Blondeau, Dana Claxton, Leanne L’Hirondelle, Michelle Lavallee, Terrance Houle, Ryan Rice, and Tania Willard.

Bio:

Daina Warren is from the Montana Slavey Cree nation, in Hobbema, Alberta. She graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design finishing her BFA with two majors, sculpture and painting. After graduating from ECIAD, an internship with the grunt gallery, offered her the opportunity to participate in the Canada Council’s “Assistance to Aboriginal Curators for Residencies in the Visual Arts.” Since completing this residency she has acquired the position of curator and administrator at the grunt gallery and has curated many projects and exhibitions both in part with the gallery and with the outlying Vancouver arts community.

Resources:

http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/essays.html http://www.firstvisionart.com/daina/index.html http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/exhibitions/current/details/don-t-stop-me-now-2493 http://www.modernfuel.org/art/programming/event/470 http://www.ahva.ubc.ca/eventsDetails.cfm?EventID=776&EventTypeNumID=5 http://artengine.ca/community/calendar-event-en.php?id=3066 http://indianacts.gruntarchives.org/essay-sequential-indianacts-daina-warren.html

Dylan AT Miner - Métis

wredstarresearchcenter — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 02:55:00 -0400

Interviewed by Prudence Hayes

Winter 2012

Social justice activist with anarcho-punk twist, artist and professor, Dylan Miner knows what he’s doing when it comes to making art with a message. All aspects of his work, from conceptual design to carefully selected sustainable printing materials, reinforce his anti-colonial and anti-capitalist messages. Miners’ artistic mediums range from sculptural to his iconic relief prints and zine style work, all with stylized radical Métis and Latino influence. With multiple solo exhibits, involvement in artist collectives, alternative galleries and bookstores, and over 40 published literary works, Miners’ connection to the messages behind his art is apparent, as it expands far beyond the individual art pieces, and into the community itself.

Prudence Hayes: You have a relatively diverse family history, and your art strongly conveys stylized Chicano/Latino influence. Did your childhood’s rural upbringing and varied family roots have a significant impact on the development of your personal style, or was this something you developed at an older age as you began to explore your own interests?

Dylan AT Miner: I was raised in the woods in rural Michigan, an area called the Thumb due to Michigan’s geography being shaped like a mitten. The small parcel of land my parents owned backed up onto an 8,000 acre parcel of state recreation land. This land was meant for hunting, hiking, and other such activities. This intimate relationship with the woods gave me a profound relationship with the local geography, thoroughly getting to know the land, its season, and its spirit.

As a Métis person, that is someone of mixed Aboriginal and European descent with roots in the North American fur trade, we do not have Indigenous status in the US. Even though there are historic Métis communities in the US (particularly Michigan, Minnesota, Montana), we do not have the same sovereignty rights as our relations across the US-Canada Border. My family has historic connections to Aboriginal communities in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and Michigan. Following the War of 1812, there was a group of Métis and Anishinaabeg who left what is today Michigan and moved north to the Georgian Bay, not wanting to be living in the United States. The shifting border became an impetus for my family’s migration. Subsequently, my grandfather’s family moved to Detroit in the early twentieth-century, a process of urbanization not unlike the experience of many Native peoples. As an older child my grandfather would share Métis family stories, a strong connection that I had with my grandfather.

The village in which I was raised was primarily white, but did have a significant number of Chicano and Mexican farmworker families who settled in the area over the course of the past two decades. As a Métis person, I saw similarities between the colonial legacy of mestizaje (miscegenation) in the Chicano community and métissage in Canada and the Great Lakes. For instance, my wife’s family is descended from detribalized Indigenous communities in New Mexico and Texas, known as genízaros. These were Spanish-speaking communities of Comanches, Apaches, Tewa, Tiwa, Tano, and sometimes Diné. So even if I didn’t verbalize it as such when I was a teenager, I saw that my indigeneity as a Métis person was shared by my Chicano peers.

At a young age, I began speaking Spanish, building lowrider bikes, and many other things associated with chicanismo. I never saw it as anything other than a part of who I was. In this way, I became active in radical Native and Chicano politics, married into a Chicano family, and artistically have been greatly influenced by Chicano and Mexican printmaking traditions. While the aesthetic influence remains, one can think specifically about my ongoing Native lowrider project (Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag), much of my more recent work has begun integrating less obvious aesthetic influences and is engaged more heavily in conceptual ideas that play with Indigenous languages and knowledge epistemologies.

Dylan AT Miner, Prints

PH: It’s obvious to the viewer that most of your art is politically motivated, correct? What were some of your early political influences? Did your indigenous/ Métis roots affect or influence this in any way?

DM: I come to my work as an artist from my position as an activist. For me, the two are not disconnected projects or identities, but seamlessly merged into one contiguous project of dismantling all that is wrong in this world. Thus, my art intentionally confronts systems of power and structures of inequality. The two main systems that I take issue with are capitalism, a system of making profit from another’s labor, and colonialism, the process of disavowing Indigenous peoples’ their (that is our) ability to be fully human. These systems are inherently interconnected. So when I make work, be it visual or intellectual, I see my critique of one system as being fully embedded in an appraisal of the other.

It all begins in my own narrative with the fur trade. This system of trapping and trading animal pelts was integral to the emergence in North America of early-capitalism (what some would call mercantilism), as well as in the colonization of the upper half of North America. Most of this system of exploitation and ecological destruction was precipitated by the European desires for beaver felt hats. In my artwork, the continuous employment of felt as a material is a comment on this process. I frequently employ felt in my work as a direct comment on the legacy of the fur trade.

Getting back to the question, there is a connection between my radical political orientation and my understanding of indigeneity. That is to be Indigenous is to embody a certain radical politcs. On the plains and prairies, our Cree relations used to refer to the Métis as the Otepaymisiwak, meaning ‘the people without bosses or leaders.’ In many ways this had to do with egalitarian Métis social structures, particularly the buffalo hunt, but I also take this identity to heart. As an Otepaymisiwak person, it is my ancestral responsibility to challenge systems of power that create networks of oppression.

As a teenager, I was heavily involved in DIY punk and hardcore, particularly interested in making zines and mini-comics. Through underground publishing, I was introduced to radical politics, primarily anarchist in orientation. Although they pre-date me, I am heavily influenced by the Red and Brown Power movements; the Black Panthers and Young Lords, the student movements in 1968, particularly Mexico City and Paris; the Third World struggles of the 1950s and 1960s; and the labor movement, especially the Industrial Workers of the World. Intellectually, Frantz Fanon, Howard Adams, and Taiaiake Alfred have influenced me beyond recognition.

Dylan AT Miner, Trabajando Cover

PH: Was there a defining moment when you realized that you wanted to meld art with focus on politics/indigenous/anti-colonization issues?

DM: In one interview I did with a Norwegian publication, I mentioned this time I was a child and came across the corpse of a poached animal. As I recalled in that interview, that incident was the moment when I realized what humans can do to fuck up things. As another human being, I could possibly prevent these sorts of senseless acts. To me, this moment was more metaphorical and poetic than any actual turning point.

I have always been interested in challenging dominant ideas and structures. In high school I was nearly expelled for publishing a zine that criticized the racist logic of the local school’s administration. The County Sheriff called my parents, who thankfully supported my critical endeavors. I look back and see the perspectives in this publication as quite naïve, but they nonetheless lay the foundation for my present practice.

PH: Do you have any apprehensions about continually including indigenous themes in your art?

DM: As an artist and intellectual, I have a body of work that revolves around issues that need to be addressed. As an indigenist, someone who takes Indigenous issues as the most important, these issues continuously work their way into my work. I think that we should flip the question and ask why Indigenous artists, as well as other artists of color, are cautioned against working in certain subjects (or simultaneously asked to work in naïve and stereotypical ways). As artists, we work with certain ideas and themes. Mine frequently engages with Indigenous politics.

One of the strategies that I hope to employ is connecting Indigenous issues with other contemporary struggles. In my recent solo exhibition in Norway, I brought together Sámi issues with Aboriginal Australian struggles and those in North America. To me, this was about drawing connections and opening up ideas, as opposed to being a negative thing.

As a member of the collective Justseeds, we did an installation in Slovenia at the 29^th Biennial of Graphic Arts in 2011. The project was about various forms of migration and the structures that either impede or provoke them. The show wasn’t about Indigenous themes, but what I brought to the installation was an interest in the way that capitalist systems negatively and disproportionately impact Indigenous communities. The project, which is an indictment on capitalism and its impact on human and non-human ecologies, includes a book that looks at migrant labor in Slovenia, as well as the dehumanizing impacts of the US-Mexico border. Since it was a project I was involved in, indigeneity is an issue, but only one among many.

PH: With your art focusing on consumerism and daily life, how do you use the tangible mediums (paper bags, etc.) you print your work on to reinforce your overall message? Do you feel that the material you choose has just as much significance as the art you display on it?

DM: I am interested in taking quotidian items and transforming them into the extra-ordinary. A significant component of this has to do with working with everyday materials. Inexpensive felt fabric, baseball bats, hockey sticks, piñatas, bicycles, paper bags, etc. By themselves these objects have a purpose, but what happens when we retool them? How does this manipulation change our relationship with them?

In this way, I began using grocery bags during a period when I had no money to buy paper. As someone who used to dumpster-dive food and magazines, I was drawn to integrating these everyday activities into my artmaking practice. Of course, I began doing this when grocery bags were commonly made of paper and neither plastic nor re-useable cotton. So it was timely in its application. Today, with the advent of plastic and cotton bags, it seems that it the use of grocery bags is an aesthetic remnant from the last decade.

Even so, I am interested in materiality and the relationship between a work’s aesthetic impact and its function. To me, materiality, process, and the object are all implicated in my practice.

Dylan AT Miner, Prints

PH: How does your own political activism relate to your art? Does one feed off the other or do you consider your personal artistic projects more of a separate entity?

DM: I believe that they are the same project. In fact, my quotidian existence as a father/partner/human, my role as a professor, my intellectual writing and labor, and my work as an artist are all one seamless project of creating a new world in the shell of the old, to borrow a saying from the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World). This realization took me some time to reconcile, but once I began seeing that my activist projects are the same as my artistic projects everything seemed much clearer. In fact, neither are distinct from my everyday existence as a human being. By and large, all the activities in which I engage are connected to the ways in which we become more human. In a society bent on dehumanizing, it is a radical move to declare oneself human. Indigenous and other anti-colonial struggles are an ancient declaration of one’s one humanity. Capitalism, as a system tied to colonial domination, is built on the process of dehumanization. If nothing else, my work is a simple declaration of my own humanity that recognizes the humanity of all my relations, whether human or non-human. This particular ontological stance can be seen in everything I do, whether it is art or activism.

Dylan AT Miner, Illustrations

Dylan AT Miner, Eastern Washington University

PH: In regard to political activism, do you have any goal messages that you wish to convey to the general public?

DM: I don’t think that I have one unitary message. Rather, my work has two simultaneous motives. Initially, it is about challenging colonial and capitalist structures of exploitation and alienation. There are quite a few Indigenous and non-Native thinkers who articulate similar perspectives. Additionally, I hope to illuminate marginalized and forgotten histories, particularly as they relate to Indigenous sovereignty and the stories of everyday folk.

PH: What motivated you to become a professor? What kind of insight do you try to instill in your students?

DM: Since I am adamant about leaving the world in a better position than I inherited it, I see teaching as an appropriate venue to transform an entire generation of thinkers. Of course, the day-to-day realities of being a professor aren’t quite as revolutionary as this. In my own family, both of my parents are public schools teachers, my grandmother taught, as well. So I come from a line of teachers and teaching is a natural aspect of my identity. My sister teaches, as well. With this family history, teaching is, in many ways, a crucial component of my practice as an artist.

To this end, my partner Estrella Torrez is a scholar of critical pedagogy, which has fundamentally transformed how I see my teaching. Critical pedagogy, especially with its origins in Paolo Freire, proposes that education has the potential to transform the world. It may be naïve, but I believe this whole-heartedly. As such, I imagine that by teaching I create a space in the classroom where students can challenge themselves, their peers, and the dominant modality of being in the world. While I include heavy Indigenous perspectives in my teaching, most of my students are non-Native. This, in and of itself, can transform how these students see themselves and their place within the world.

PH: Do you have any current or upcoming projects, plans, or artistic aspirations you’d like to shine a light upon?

DM: I have some interesting projects currently going on, both as an individual and as a member of the collective Justseeds. As a member of Justseeds, I just published an artists’ guidebook to Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. The book deals with migration and is an extension of an earlier installation in Europe. That book is available for purchase on the Justseeds website (justseeds.org). Additionally, two other members of the collective, Favianna Rodríguez and Roger Peet, are organizing an immigrant rights poster campaign, which will be completed later this spring. I am contributing one on Indigenous issues related to immigration. As a collective, we also have an exhibition at Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin. This past winter, Justseeds member Nicolas Lampert organized a print portfolio with IVAW (Iraqi Veterans Against the War) and Combat Papers. The portfolio addresses the theme of veteran’s resistance to military ventures. While I cannot think of all of them at this moment, I am sure that Justseeds has some other projects in development, as well.

Personally, I have a bunch of projects that I am excited about. That is one of my biggest dilemmas: developing too many projects simultaneously. Two big ones are my ongoing project Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes) and a recent installation and collaboration in Sápmi, traditional Sami reindeer herding territory (Indigenous Northern Norway). Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag consists of a series of workshops in which I collaborate with Indigenous youth and/or artists to build Indigenous bicycles. To date I have done this workshop four times, twice with Native youth in Michigan; once with Indigenous and non-Native students at Fort Lewis College, a former residential school that offers Native students a tuition waiver; and most recently in Vancouver with urban Native artists. In these collaborations, I have produced fourteen bikes in total, with future workshops pending. The first seven bikes are presently traveling around to tribal museums, while the four newest ones are part of Beat Nation, an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Dylan AT Miner, Anishnaabensag Biimskowebshkigewag (Native Kids Ride Bikes)

As I conduct this interview, I am sitting on a plane returning from my project in Norway where I created an installation and worked with Sámi activists. The exhibition, named in the Northern Sámi language, is called NÁGGÁRVUOĐAS, BEALUŠTUSSAN (meaning In Defiance, In Defense). The project directly responded to a recent municipal decision to not include the Sámi language on local signage in Tromsø, the city where I exhibited. While the city council earlier approved that Tromsø would join the Sami Language Area, the newly elected conservative mayor unilaterally reversed this decision. I was interested in commenting on this situation.

So in collaboration with Sámi artist Sara Margethe Oskal, I produced a series of 72 signs with 12 different Sámi and English text that audiences removed from the gallery and placed around Tromsø. The project also included a youth screen printing workshop which was attended by Indigenous, Norwegian, and international youth. From this project, I have also begun developing even more projects, including an exhibition of contemporary Sámi art in the United States.

I am also doing lots of writing. I have two books that are under contract, which need to be revised in the near future. One looks at contemporary Indigenous aesthetics, the other at Chicano art.

PH: Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?

DM: This is a complex question, one without a simple answer. I do identify as a contemporary Indigenous artist, but I do not position myself as either a Native American or an American Indian artist. As a Métis person, I am indigenous to this continent, but in the United States Native American and American Indian are categories that denote a particular relationship to the federal government. As Métis people, we have a unique history of colonization, one tied to that of our treaty Indian relations.

As a political artist, my work is already on the margins of the contemporary biennial and art fair world. Likewise, Indigenous artists working in non-stereotypical ways face a dilemma of not fitting into the space created for ‘Indian arts’ or seen as derivative by the contemporary art world. I am interested in the way that as Indigenous artists we both create space within dominant institutions, while also establishing parallel structures. Ryan Rice is curating some interesting shows at MoCNA (Museum of Contemporary Native Arts) in Santa Fe, while Nancy Mithlo is bringing Indigenous artists to Venice. Urban Shaman Gallery in Winnipeg has historically had important shows, as well. Each of these spaces are challenging how we think about contemporary Indigenous art. I am excited to see how Indigenous artists continue to transform what we think about as Indigenous art. So I think these terms are useful.

PH: Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

DM: I was just in Australia and find the work of Bianca Beetson and Fiona Foley, both Aboriginal artists, interesting. Likewise, there are some interesting Sámi artists working in the north of Norway. I spent an interesting afternoon with Hans Ragnar Matthisen. I also like Joar Nango. In the US, I like the print work of Dignidad Rebelde (Xicano), while Métis artist David Garneau is doing some interesting work.

Artist Biography

DYLAN A.T. MINER (MÉTIS) is a border-crossing artist, activist, historian, and curator. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian). In 2011, he will hang five solo exhibitions in the US and Canada. As a member of Justseeds, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the 28th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Slovenia, and installed a solo Justseeds exhibition at the 29th Biennial. Next year, he will host a solo exhibition in Norway, as well as install a show at Columbia College Chicago immediately prior to the G8 and NATO summits in that city. Miner holds a PhD in the history of art from The University of New Mexico. He has published and lectured extensively, with two forthcoming books from University of Arizona Press and IB Tauris. To date, he has published more than forty journal articles, book chapters, review essays, and encyclopedia entries. Currently, Miner teaches in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, coordinates the Michigan Native Arts Initiative, and curates at the MSU Museum (www.dylanminer.com).

Resources:

www.dylanminer.com

http://www.justseeds.org/artists/dylan_miner/

http://rcah.msu.edu/profile/dminer

http://.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Miner

Skawennati - Mohawk

wredstarresearchcenter — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:51:00 -0400

Interview by Sharita Towne

Winter 2012

Portrait by Alex Subrizzi

Skawennati is an artist, independent curator, and Co-director at AbTeC (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace). It is her unique approach to storytelling, imagining the future, change, cultural richness, and growth that drew me to her work. Artistically speaking we can call Skawennati a “New Media Artist,” yet there is much more to her body of work than simple software and graphics. I am glad, in a word, to have been introduced to her work but I am grateful that she took the time to answer my questions so thoughtfully.

Sharita Towne: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview with the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists blog. We are especially honored to have you, as an artist who knows firsthand the importance of forging digital spaces for Native artists, communities, and young people in Cyberspace. Can you tell us about the community you grew up in, and how it influenced you to become an artist, and particularly, a New Media Artist?

Skawennati: I think that I was pretty much born an artist, into a family of artists —not my parents or my siblings, but many of my Mohawk family members are very creative individuals, expressing themselves through sewing, beadwork, embroidery, pottery, woodworking and painting. My great aunt taught me to sew when I was three. I have very fond memories of looking through bags and bags of fabric in her closet; of her teaching me to put beads on a needle; of making my first stuffed animal (a giraffe!). Her daughter, Kathleen, who is like an older sister to me, encouraged my artistic tendencies in every way, from teaching me skills herself, like quilting and how to make a clay pot, to taking courses with me at the Visual Arts Centre. “Painting with Pastels” was one, and there was one where we learned to use hydrastone. She is still an incredible support to me.

When I went to university, my intention was to become a designer, probably a graphic designer. I didn’t yet know any artists or how one went about becoming one. It still wasn’t a real job to me at that time. It was the early 90s and the desktop computer was just starting to appear. My department, Design Art at Concordia University, was pretty cutting-edge because we had an Apple 2e lab! And an Amiga lab! It was love at first sight for me, though (perhaps unfortunately) I never became a geek. I was never that interested in what was under the hood; it was what you could do with them that excited me. While at University, I joined the First Nations student group; It was a small group, but most of its members were artists, and I started to realize that I was one of them.

After graduating, Ryan Rice, Eric Robertson, and myself founded Nation to Nation, a First Nations artist collective, to help us to stay motivated to produce artwork, and to offer ourselves and other artists moral support and venues to show their work. Around that time, I began to work at an artist-run centre called Oboro Gallery. The director Daniel Dion, was also very excited about computers and this new “internet” thing (this was around 1996). We kinda bonded over that and he encouraged me to figure out how to use e-mail, and all the new stuff that was developing at super speed.

Images from CyberPowWow.net

Without their support CyberPowWow would not have happened. So all these things together make me the artist that I am today. But, as for becoming an artist, I think I was born that way. I had to fight to convince my father to accept my decision to major in Fine Arts. He wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. He’s proud of me now, though.

ST: Can you talk a bit about your work as Co-director at AbTeC (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace) and how it started?

S: AbTeC is a research network that I co-direct with my partner (in life), Jason Lewis (http://www.facebook.com/jasonedwardlewis). We’re artists who like to make stuff, so the product of our research is artwork. The idea of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace started with CyberPowWow (CyberPowWow.net), which I claimed was an aboriginal territory in cyberspace. I came to realize that it was vital that Native people participate in the shaping of Cyberspace, so that we could determine our own image there. Prior new technologies had shaped the way non-Natives saw us —the camera taught people that we all wore headdresses; movies showed us as mute, or monosyllabic at best. But today, many of us Native types have been able to get our hands on a computer at the same time/rate as the rest of the population. We use it to tell our own stories, create our own images, and to have an effect on how the whole thing looks and works and acts. And we are teaching others to do the same through the Skins Storytelling and New Media Workshops for Youth (skins.abtec.org).

ST: One aspect that I find particularly intriguing about your work, is the way you bring together the past, the present, and the future, with both insight and playfulness. Your current work TimeTravellerTM has all these qualities. When did you first conceive of this idea of history in the future, and what has the journey been like to bring this idea to life? Do you see yourself continuing to develop this subject matter?

Right: Image from Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, Left: Image from TimeTraveller™

S: Thank you for your kind words. In 2001 I was commissioned to create a work for the Edmonton Art Gallery’s millennium exhibition (many galleries were doing special projects for the turn of the millennium). I made “Imagining Indians in the 25th Century” which is structured upon a timeline of one thousand years of history, starting in 1492, two years before Columbus’ arrival in North America, and ending in 2490. I imagined a Turtle Island as once again being populated and governed by an Aboriginal majority. In addition to reports that Aboriginal people are the fastest growing segment of the population (at least, in Canada) I was inspired by the idea that the majority of the population could easily be Aboriginal if all “half-breeds” and “mixed-bloods” and “grandchildren of a Cherokee” and all of our ancestors children where considered to be Aboriginal, instead of the other way around. Rather than seeing Indians as “diluted,” what would happen if everyone with any Indian heritage was counted as Indian? We’d live in a very different place, I think. Another reason for making that piece, and subsequent artworks about the future, was that I began to sense this feeling in Indian Country, that the only great things we’d done were in the past. While I love our traditions —our ceremonies and crafts and stories— it seemed like many people were trying to bring back the past, rather than create a future for ourselves in which we are once again great. (I think this has started to change).

Second Life ribbon shirt made by Charlotte Fisher, necklace by Sahar Homami, and stadium by Nancy-Elizabeth Townsend.

I have 5 more episodes of TimeTravellerTM planned, and once they are done, I plan to stop making machinima for a while. I have some ideas for some new work that will also be future-oriented. I’d like to make artifacts from the future, such as a wampum belt and a ribbon shirt, both of which are in the process of being designed right now. In these works I am asking myself, “In the future, what will we wear as regalia? What kind of agreement would we honour with a wampum belt?” I think I may also wear the costumes and artifacts in significant locations and then create a photograph.

ST: I have watched the first 4 episodes of TimeTravellerTM, and have been amazed by the attention to detail in every avatar and setting. How long does one episode take to make, and what is the collaboration process like?

Episode 01, TimeTraveller™

S: The first episode took two years, as we had to learn *everything* —how Second Life worked, how to move in it, how to dress people, how to make them look Indian. Then we had to figure out what tools we use to make the machinima. What was the best software app to capture the action? What settings were compatible with the editing software, and with how the work would ultimately be shown? The second took about a year, and Episodes 03 and 04 were made in the third year. Each one takes less time as the team gets better and better. Also, Second Life continually improves. It’s now possible to do things that were technically infeasible when we started.

For me, the term “collaboration” really means that two or more people have conceptualized a work and made it happen, so I don’t really think of this as a collaboration. That said, I work very closely with a small team whose opinions I greatly value. The core is made up of three multi-talented Production Assistants, Nancy- Elizabeth Townsend, Charlotte Fisher, and Sahar Homami (and other people who have moved on over the years. Check out the credits!). They know how to 3D model, texture, and animate. They make all the sets, props, and wardrobe. They have also necessarily become experts in Second Life, and can customize and operate avatars (basically “casting” and acting) too. When we are in pre-production, I give them the script I’ve written and we create from that a list of the avatars we’ll need, what they’ll be wearing and what custom actions they have to do (like a jingle dance).

TimeTraveller™ Production Still: Jingle Dancers Assembled. 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Storyboard from Episode 03 of TimeTraveller™

I draw pictures, bring in swatches of fabric and basically act as Art Director (I think that’s what it’s called in Film). When we have been able, we have gone to real-life locations (such as St-Francis Xavier church in Kahnawake) to photograph every inch of the place so that we could replicate it.

Book image of St-Marie-Amoung-the-Hurons Indian Church c1600 and the Indian Church set built on AbTeC Island in Second Life from upcoming Episode 05 of TimeTraveller™

While they make the stuff, I then find the voice actors who will play the characters. With my trusted Sound Designer/Technician, Shawn Mullen, we record the voices. Then we are ready to shoot. Now the Production Assistants become Avatar Operators. We “choreograph” the scene. I direct. I say, “Okay, Nancy, you walk towards the picnic table and look down at the pizza, while, Charlotte, you play this sound file so that your avatar can “say” his line. Action!” And Nancy presses the arrow key until the avatar reaches the picnic table and then moves her mouse so that he looks down. (Sometimes, we need more avatars in a scene than we have people to operate them. We sometimes have one person operating two computers, with multiple Second Life windows open on each!) I am also the “machinamatographer’ (new word!) — I shoot the scene using a 3D mouse as a movie camera to frame the image, while using software to capture the screen action. Once all the footage is shot, I edit in Final Cut Pro. Other post-production work includes some After Effects business —all the HUD features are created and animated that way— and sound design.

ST: Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?

S: Yes, I am definitely a Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist. But I’d say I think of myself as an artist who is also Mohawk, and a woman and an activist and a Generation X-er and a few other things. I have mixed feelings about “terms like that.” They are very useful in some ways, confining in others. For one thing, they help us Indians identify each other! I truly believe that the main reason we as a community have gotten this far in the art world is because we started talking to each other, working together, helping each other. Of course, we’ve had a lot of non-Native supporters along the way as well, and we couldn’t have done it without them.

From my perspective at the moment, there is definitely a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world. But I think a number of things are happening simultaneously. I think that we as a community have different subject matter that we want to interrogate in our work, and different audiences. I think, too, that we are still learning about the rest of the art world. I mean, we just got into the Venice Biennale in 1995! And there had already been forty of them! I think we’re learning both how to be like them and how we are different from them. But for sure something interesting is happening right now, as evidenced by Close Encounters, a huge (the biggest so far!) exhibition of international Indigenous artists created as Winnipeg’s banner project for their Cultural Capital of Canada program. There was so much parallel programming that it seemed like every museum and gallery in the city went “red.” And I can’t wait to see the reaction to the next Sydney Biennale!

ST: Have you ever felt pigeon-holed as an artist, if you have, in what ways have you felt pigeon-holed, and how have you dealt with that feeling?

S: No, thankfully, I have not. The only time I felt pressure to create “fluffs and feathers” was when I was in art school! Many of my teachers urged me to use more natural materials. I was like, “Why?!?” I was into bright colours, plexiglass and science fiction.

And I didn’t see any contradiction between that and my authenticity as an Onkwehonwe (Mohawk for Native person). I still don’t.

“Four Faces of Skawennati” a composite image created as a possible design direction for Skawennati.com

ST: You will be presenting at “Reconfigured Realities” this month. Can you tell us about it, and what more we can look forward to in 2012?

S: Reconfigured Realities is the theme of this year’s New Sun conference. I will be telling them a lot of the stuff I’ve talked about in this interview. I’ve also been asked to show an episode of TimeTravellerTM.

2012 is looking pretty exciting. The Eiteljorg show, We Are Here, will be travelling for the first time ever and it is going to one of my favourite cities ever, NYC and will be shown at the NMAI. That’s June 1. And I just found out last night that my work will be included in Changing Hands 3, at the Museum of Art and Design, also in NYC! I am quite happy. I’ve been asked to present my work at the new Native cegep (a kind of college we have in Quebec) and at Concordia University and a couple of other places —I post everything on my FaceBook page. The main thing is I want to finish all ten episodes of TimeTravellerTM this year!

ST: Thank you for sharing your time with us Skawennati. Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

S: Ryan Rice, Jason Edward Lewis www.thethoughtshop.com, http://www.poemm.net, http://www.facebook.com/ jasonedwardlewis

Bio:

Skawennati is an artist and independent curator with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Since 1996, she has been working in New Media, beginning with the pioneering, Aboriginally-determined, on-line gallery and chat space, CyberPowWow. Her own artwork, which addresses history, the future, and change, has been widely exhibited. Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, a web-based paper doll/time-travel journal has been presented across North America, most notably in Artrain USA’s three- year, coast-to-coast tour of the show “Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture”. A print version of this piece is in the collection of the Canada Art Bank. 80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music, her ongoing series of one-minute music videos, continues to grow; and her current production, TimeTravellerTM, is a multi-platform project featuring a machinima series. Its website, www.TimeTravellerTM.com, won imagineNative’s 2009 Best New Media Award. Skawennati is currently Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Aboriginal virtual environments. Their project, Otsì:!, a game mod created with students from Kahnawake Survival School, won imagineNative’s 2010 Best New Media Award. Skawennati has also been awarded a 2011 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art.

http://www.skawennati.com/

http://www.facebook.com/skawennati

http://www.abtec.org/index.html

http://www.cyberpowwow.net/

http://timetravellertm.com/

Joi Arcand - Plains Cree

wredstarresearchcenter — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 14:21:00 -0400

Joi Arcand at Tombstone Territorial Park, Yukon Territory

Interview by Eliza Gregory

Winter 2012

Joi Arcand has made some really exciting and incredible work recently about the disappearance of First Nations languages, and it was this project—Here On Future Earth—that first drew me to interviewing her. In the photographs that comprise the project, she has been able to layer subtle humor, vernacular imagery, imagination, and lamentation to pose questions about the evolution—and loss—of culture. When I look at photo-based work these days, I am looking for artists who have something important to say with their pictures, and who use pictures as a starting point for engagement with people and ideas, rather than as an end point. Joi Arcand is certainly doing that, and it was a pleasure to speak with her about her trajectory as an artist, the ideas she is passionate about, and her relationship to the people around her.

Amber Motors, from the series Here on Future Earth, 2009, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

http://www.joitarcand.com/blog/here-on-future-earth-2/?pid=55

Eliza Gregory: I’m so excited about you’re Here on Future Earth project. It is so awesome! I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that project here.

First off, has it had the general impact that you wanted it to? How have you been able to gauge that?

Joi Arcand: Here On Future Earth was inspired by my time spent working at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre, which represents the 8 First Nations languages that are spoken in the province: Plains Cree, Woodland Cree, Swampy Cree, Dene, Nakawe, Dakota, Lakota, Nakota. I had the privilege of being surrounded by First Nations language specialists and language learning materials every day. Being around people who are speaking their languages everyday and are advocates for their languages inspired me to address this topic in this series. For this project, I worked primarily with Darryl Chamakese who translated all of the words for me. Working on this project led me towards many other people who are working on language revitalization. I’ve received a lot of feedback from people who didn’t know anything about the state of indigenous languages, people who don’t know about the syllabics writing system so I think that the educational impact has been an incredible thing.

Ice Cream Legislature, from the series Here on Future Earth, 2009, Regina, Saskatchewan

http://www.joitarcand.com/blog/here-on-future-earth-2/?pid=59

EG: It seems to me—as someone whose language is not threatened—that the urgency and the pain of losing a language (or having it be threatened) is something that a lot of people have never considered and may have a hard time understanding. Language has such a profound relationship to culture. I think what’s so powerful about this project is that you illustrate both that relationship, and then what it means to experience this loss of language (and by extension, culture). How does that resonate with the different audiences who are seeing your work?

JA: Language is culture. There are far too many indigenous languages that are either extinct or endangered. Cree has been named one of the three languages that remain ‘viable’ by Statistics Canada; the number of speakers varies from 12,000-75,000. However, I realized that my own inability to speak the language means that in my family, the language is extinct. This realization triggered urgency in me that the time is now to start revitalizing our indigenous languages. So, this journey is a very personal one for me, and if Here On Future Earth educates or informs people about the state of indigenous languages, then I see that as a good thing.

Northern Pawn, South Vietnam from the series Here on Future Earth, 2009, North Battleford, Saskatchewan

http://www.joitarcand.com/blog/here-on-future-earth-2/?pid=62

EG: And then, how would you like to push this understanding further? What is the next step you want people to take (either intellectually or in terms of action)? Are you making work now that will push people further in this direction?

JA: For me, the next step is to start learning and using the language. That is the bottom line, the next step.

The work I did with Here On Future Earth was completely visual and conceptual – I am excited about making work around language that is more auditory and real. I feel the work did great things to bring awareness to the precarious state of many indigenous languages, but to me the real work is in taking a step further to actually speaking, using, and learning the language – to have it exist in real everyday conversations.

I also wrote an article about another activist who is fighting to save his language, which goes more in-depth into the reasons why our languages are endangered and what we can do about it.

EG: Could you talk a little about the Give Her a Face exhibition? What was the story of those women who died, and do you think the exhibition achieved its goal of making that situation more palpable, relevant and urgent to the broader community?

JA: Give Her A Face was a group exhibition that was comprised of work by Felicia Gay, Chrystal Kruszelnicki, and myself. We created the exhibition while we were students at the University of Saskatchewan with support from PAVED Arts (pavedarts.ca) and grunt gallery (grunt.ca).

Moon Lake #3, from the Moon Lake Series, 2005

http://www.joitarcand.com/blog/moon-lake-series/?pid=21

Felicia Gay and I collaborated on the Moon Lake series, she came up with the concept and I assisted in several aspects of the production of the project. The photographs that make up the Moon Lake series were partly inspired by the book Just Another Indian, by Warren Goulding. The book brings to light the circumstances surrounding the murders of several indigenous women in Saskatoon in the mid 1990’s and the media indifference and lack of police action that took place then and is still taking place now. There are more than 500 missing Indigenous women in Canada – missing mothers, sisters, daughters, aunties, cousins, girlfriends, wives, and friends and this series aimed to give a face to the number.

By A Thread, gallery installation view, Give Her A Face exhibition, 2004

I had a solo piece in the exhibition called By A Thread which is a photographic mixed-media collage/sculpture based on the Starblanket pattern that is prominent in First Nations quilting designs. This piece is made up of black and white portraits of women from my home community of Muskeg Lake Cree Nation. The photos were torn into diamond shapes and then sewn back together to form the star. Women are the backbone of our communities and I wanted to demonstrate the strength of women and the bonds of community. This piece added a further personal aspect to the exhibition as it contains portraits of beautiful First Nations women that are important in my life.

The last exhibition of the Give Her A Face exhibition was in 2007 at the Grunt Gallery in Vancouver. At this time the Pickton trial was going on and what we were addressing in the exhibition was very real and palpable in the city at that time – and still is, as the public inquiry examining the role of the Vancouver police and the RCMP and why neither force was able to stop a serial killer, or even acknowledge that one existed, while sex workers were vanishing in the late 1990s and early 2000 is ongoing. I think the impact of what we did at that time, in addressing the silence in the media, was a part of a movement towards creating our own media (as indigenous women) and creating a space where we could talk about the injustice.

In Brunt Magazine in 2007, Nikki Meier wrote, “In this way, these artists truly have gone beyond the book that inspired them in which it was suggested that the best way to reach out and expand the message of the missing Aboriginal women was often limited to postering telephone pole upon telephone pole. While it is no small feat to accomplish what this trio has, it is clearly not impossible. In order to create the change we need to stop the ongoing violence against Aboriginal women, we need to continue paving the way in our own fashion, perhaps fueled by the artistic endeavors of artists like Arcand, Gay and Kruszelnicki.”

EG: What has it been like to be in Vancouver recently? How do you feel your work changing as you’ve gained new perspective on your relationship to home and place?

JA: I am a visitor to Coast Salish Territories/Vancouver. I have been reluctant to let it seep into my art practice because I am a visitor. My work still remains rooted in place, the place I call home–the prairies, the boreal forest–these places are in my bones, in my DNA, in my cellular memory. I feel lucky that I can live and travel to different places and know that I can always return home. I’m sure the influence of Vancouver will show up in my work eventually, as I process what my presence here means. I have met some amazing people here and consider it an extension of home.

Pictures from Dawson, 2011.

http://www.joitarcand.com/blog/posts/until-its-time-for-you-to-go-pt-1/

EG: And I’d love to hear about your recent residency in Dawson. I’ve looked at your blog, and it sounds like you’ve been really busy! Would you share an anecdote or some thoughts about that experience?

JA: Dawson City is a magical place! I had the opportunity to stay in a 100-year-old (haunted?) house. I had the privilege of space and time to dedicate to my art thanks to the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture artist-in-residence program. I met so many amazing people and was really inspired by the creative community that exists there. If you have a chance to go, you should!

EG: Who are your most important influences so far in your career? Who inspires you?

JA: My grandmothers.

EG: How have your interests evolved since you started making work? How would you describe your approach to being an artist and producing work?

JA: I began making artwork that addressed my identity in my second year of university, which is when I decided to pursue a BFA degree. I decided to focus on photography and printmaking. My first photography projects were in direct response to the images created by photographer Edward S. Curtis in the early 1900s. I reacted to his photographs by creating portraits of my family members. The photos were not technically very successful, but I think they were successful in countering what Curtis had created in his images of the “vanishing Indian.” This first project led me to create images that directly challenged the images of “Indians” in the media, advertising, and pop culture. In many ways, I am still working through these ideas in my current work, but have moved away from directly referencing the work of Curtis – the references will, in a way, always be there as I continue in the photographic medium, but maybe they are more subtle.

My interests fluctuate between digital and analog ways of making art. I have primarily used digital technologies to create my projects and lately I’ve been curious about what I would make without the use of these technologies. I am interested to see what comes of this. For example, I’ve been experimenting with hair embroidery and other more tactile forms of art making.

EG: And this is a question that all the students working on this blog are asking each artist, because it’s amazing to see the way different people approach this issue:

Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?

JA: I: I could be labeled that way. I am contemporary. I am a descendant of the Indigenous people of North America, and identify as such. I am an Artist. I am also an artist who is part Plains Cree, part Métis, part German-settler-Canadian and all of this informs my work. What I do as an artist is speak my truth from my experience and my experience is all I know. I am happy being referred to as just an artist, as well.

EG: What do you do in addition to making photo-based art?

JA: I am interested in publishing, art books, zines, collage and making art accessible to everyone. I believe everyone is an artist. When I was in high school, there were no art classes offered, as there were no resources. And when I think back to the art classes that were offered to me in middle school I remember feeling so uninspired and stifled that these classes were mainly used to slack-off. Today, I enjoy being a mentor to young people and exposing them to artists and art forms that make me excited – and that I did not have access to as a young person.

EG: Can you recommend another artist that we should interview for this blog in the future?

JA: Lori Blondeau, Tania Willard, Adrian Stimson, Wally Dion, Michele Mackasey, Erin Konsmo, Jackie Traverse, Marika Swan, Chandra Melting Tallow, KC Adams…..

ARTIST BIO:

Joi T. Arcand is a photo-based artist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan currently residing in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with Great Distinction from the University of Saskatchewan in 2005. She has served as chair of the board of directors for Paved Arts in Saskatoon and was the co-founder of the Red Shift Gallery, a contemporary aboriginal art gallery in Saskatoon.

Her work merges the personal with the political through the use of her own family history in addressing the Canadian aboriginal experience. Drawing from her family narratives, Arcand’s photo work connects memory and landscape with humour and nostalgia, while asking questions about what it means to be a mixed-race aboriginal woman. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery 101 in Ottawa, York Quay Gallery in Toronto, Mendel Art Gallery and Paved Arts in Saskatoon, Grunt Gallery in Vancouver, and published in BlackFlash Magazine.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

Artist website

http://www.joitarcand.com/blog/

ARTIST HIGHLIGHTS VANISHING CREE LANGUAGE IN PHOTO SERIES, CAPYI 2009 Magazine Online

http://cap.vcn.bc.ca/capyimagazine/joi

Language Warrior, an article written by Joi Arcand

http://squamishlanguage.com/blog/language_warrior/

PRAIRIE TO PICTURE : SELF-PORTRAITS OF JACKIE TRAVERSE AND JOI T. ARCAND
by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Co-Curator

http://www.g101.ca/exhibits/prairie-scene-pimâskweyâw

Felicia Gay, Joi Arcand, Chrystal Kruszelnicki, Give Her a Face, October 27 to December 2, 2006, Brunt Magazine

http://www.bruntmag.com/issue3/give-her-a-face.html

Exhibition at Harbour Front Centre

http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/visualarts/2011/combine-main-gallery/

Deana Dartt-Newton- Chumash/Californio/Mayo/Cochimi

wredstarresearchcenter — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 06:55:00 -0500

Interview By Elayne Janiak

Winter 2012

Dr. Dartt-Newton began her tenure as Curator of Native American Art with the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum on January 2, 2012. She received her bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in anthropology from the University of Oregon. She previously served as Curator of Native American Ethnology at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. She was also an assistant professor of American Indian Studies at the University. She and her husband have one daughter.

Elayne Janiak: I understand that your doctoral dissertation examined the “take home” messages left with museum visitors regarding Native Americans and how these messages differed from the lived experiences and alternative histories told by Native people themselves. What are some of those “take home” messages? How are they imparted by museums? How can those messages be corrected?

Deana Dartt-Newton: Some of the most prevalent messages are that Native people are gone—at least the “real” or “pure” ones. The historic materials reflect the uncontaminated Native culture that was “replaced” by the dominant, mainstream American one. Many venues portray this in a chronological trajectory where the Indians are only at the beginning of the story—literally placed at the entry of the exhibit spaces, but left behind in every way. One way to disrupt this narrative is through multimedia presentations— of living Native peoples. Some look “Native,” others don’t. Some do “traditional” cultural practices, some don’t. I say, show it all. Talk about the actual history of place in text panels. Show maps of displacement of local people and discuss what this meant for identity and cultural knowledge for the people.

A new narrative doesn’t HAVE to be imparted in new exhibits. In fact, I argue that older museums can use outdated exhibits to discuss outdated narratives and how these narratives shaped the current perceptions of Native people.

Integrate contemporary, political, edgy, thought-provoking art by Native artists.

Ultimately, what my dissertation argues is that for museums to adequately tell Native histories they must be engaged with local Native communities.

EJ: The Oregon Historical Society, across the street from the Portland Art Museum (PAM), holds many Native American artifacts and currently has a travelling exhibit entitled “Oregon Is Indian Country” which is described as follows: ”Oregon’s Indian traditions will be illuminated by many art forms including native voices, historical artifacts, photographs and more, producing a powerful exhibition.” Should the interpretation of traditional Native American artifacts in an art museum, such as PAM, differ from the interpretation of such artifacts in an historical or ethnological museum? If so, how ?

DD-N: Coming from the perspective of Native woman and anthropologist, I think that Art museums should provide a little more context than they do—through various media. It pains me to see historic materials without contemporary works, photos, video, etc. that demonstrate the rest of the story—the continuation, innovation, preservation of cultural lifeways. The focus is different in an art museum, as it should be—on the art. But what many museum visitors do not realize is that for Native artists (many, not all), art is rooted in culture, community and place. Ideas that add dimension to a work of art (from the perspective of the artist or the artist’s culture) are important to include. Should the art museum replicate what the history museum does? No. But with an emphasis on the art form, tell a more complete story of materials, motifs, uses and continuation of the practice (even if that includes WHY some practices were discontinued or changed to adapt to an art market, etc.).

I also think that Native art collecting is a highly political act and relates to social issues that beg transparency. How did these materials come to be in the Art museum?? What influences have Native people had on collections, collecting, and the art market itself.

So—with a focus more clearly on the form rather than the function of historic materials and a discussion of continuity and change, that provides the visitor with a clear picture of “living” traditions which are often innovative and changing—Art museums have a different story to tell, but one that is equally contextualized.

EJ: You have noted the reliance of teachers on museums to cover school curriculum on Native American life. This is certainly the case with Portland area teachers utilizing the PAM. The Portland Public Schools has published “Indians In Oregon Today” which gives guidelines for teaching about Indian Culture (this document was reviewed by Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes, the Oregon Government-to-Government Education Center and the Oregon Indian Education Association). Briefly, the guidelines recommend: “(a). concentrating on the contemporary Indian community rather than historical facts, (b) focusing on the Tribal group nearest the school, since an understanding of the local Indian community will give a better perspective on generalizations made about Indians regionally and nationally (c) attempting to deal with real life, including controversial issues and (d) concentrating more on the processes of Indian life, rather than the products.” What are your thoughts on the ideas in these guidelines, i.e. contemporary, local, real life, processes, and how PAM’s gallery teaching could or should interface with these ideas? (Note: The easiest way to find the document on-line is to Google “Indians In Oregon Today”.)

DD-N: I love that Oregon has such a document. California does not and the teaching of Native life is centered in an ethnographic snapshot in time that probably never actually existed, and erases the presence of Native people today. I have only just begun to work with the education staff, but have some ideas about bringing life and contemporary local histories into the gallery spaces (which currently are rather dead and unengaging). My vision for the PAM is that it begin to work in tandem with Native communities. For instance, an Oregon Indian internship program, where Native people work with education staff in the development of tours and education materials would help us get up to speed in terms of curriculum goals while providing community members with professional development for Tribal museum or museum/art related careers. In the coming months I intend to assemble a Native American Advisory Council to address the needs of the communities in terms of access, NAGPRA, art education, and professional development. This is something I believe ALL museums with Native American holdings should do.

EJ: Gallery teaching is an important program at the PAM, as it is at most museums. What do you see the role of docents being in Native American gallery teaching, both for students and adults? What curatorial guidance do you hope to provide to docents? What feedback do you hope to seek from docents? Who else, other than docents, do you think should do gallery teaching? What role do you think music or multimedia installations could play in gallery teaching?

DD-N: The role of docents is an extremely important one. In all museums, the volunteer staff is charged with being the front-line interpreters. This means that they are extremely valuable (yet underpaid). My research in CA demonstrated that those people are rarely exposed to living Indian people and that their perspective of modern Indian life is often quite skewed. My goal is to get our docents in touch with living people, resources such as books and film, and my own experience and guidance, to help them to “get current” so that they can better convey a local, modern approach to Native art and cultures. It would be fun to do a youth docent program in the summer, involving organizations such as NAYA and NARA as well as local non-Native youth to spend time in the galleries and develop a program that appeals to their age group.

I’d love to hear from the docents about anything they think might be useful for me to know. I’d like to have an open-door policy so that they are comfortable communicating with me.

People are learning on their own through conversations they have in the galleries and at lunch afterward. Research suggests that we offer them a buffet of information and allow them to take what they want/can assimilate and hopefully they will come back for more. We should be providing media to engage all types of learners including musical, tactile, academic, visual, kinesthetic (I know there are more). Docents should serve as a guide to these experiences, not as a lecturer. Multimedia quickly brings living voices to old materials. I highly recommend it. Even if it’s in an adjacent space—it allows the visitor to experience and relate to living people/cultures.

EJ: What museum-sponsored non-gallery public education programs do you feel are appropriate for Native American art, i.e. speakers? documentaries? field trips?. What would be your objective in presenting these programs?

DD-N: All of the above… Disrupt pervasive ideas and provide a meaningful alternative that more closely reflects Native life and contemporary issues.

EJ: I read that you entered your field after being asked by your tribe in 1998 to accompany a large archeological collection to the University of Oregon and participate in its analysis. You said that, while there, you became aware of a dire need for Native representation in museums. Could you talk in more detail about that experience and also about your path from that point, including your sources of guidance and inspiration and support?

DD-N: You did your homework!

A couple of things happened. The more involved I became in archaeology and academia overall, the more I was exposed to bad anthropological work. Not just the old-school archies, but living, practicing, anthros that were doing really harmful things in and around our communities. As I explored this phenomenon I realized that museums were often the physical manifestations, venues for presenting this bad scholarship. The very places which stored our precious ancestral things were complicit in erasing us from the modern landscape. At that same time, I was researching NAGPRA compliance among the federal agencies in the Chumash region for my master’s thesis and found that consultation practices were little more than informal conversations between agency officials and individual Indian people. There was (and still is) no system of consulting with the Bands/Tribes in the area and therefore no real accountability. This research led me to examine the museums and how and with what “experts,” they develop their exhibits and programs.

I struggled with the decision to leave archaeology and the field of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) because there are very few skilled and conscientious people doing that work and there is definitely a need. My three elder relatives whom I rely upon for guidance in big life decisions encouraged me to stay in school (and in the PNW where I had started my own family) and all three assured me that my work would eventually bring me (and my family) back home.

I found great friends at the University of Oregon—Oregon Indian people such as Diane Teeman (Burns Piaute), David Lewis (Grand Ronde) and Jason Younker (Coquille), together with whom I began to find my voice as a Native scholar. Later, I found mentors in the Pacific Northwest like Rebecca Dobkins at the Hallie Ford, Robin Wright at the Burke, and Barbara Brotherton at the Seattle Art Museum. These women continue to offer so much support and guidance.

My daughter, Allukoy is my greatest inspiration. It is vital that she and other Native children are able to relate to portrayals of Native people when they visit museums in the third and fourth grades—not alienated by them. I have a hand in how that future is shaped and I am humbled—but also motivated—by that truth.

EJ: In a Native American art museum, what should be the balance between traditional pieces and contemporary pieces? How do you think they should be linked?

DD-N: I think that all of it should complement the whole. There is no defined distinction between the two. Older scholars and artists say “contemporary” is 1960 or newer. Young artists and scholars say 1980… Some argue that edgy and political art is the “contemporary” and traditional forms are not—even if they are recently made. The text at the entry to the Grand Ronde Center for Native American Art at PAM says we collect and display “traditional” Native American art. What’s that? Who defines traditional? Some young artists argue (vehemently) against narrow definitions that restrict their creativity and voice as Native people.

I know that the new galleries here at PAM will mix it up. I had a thought the other day that I would like to have an equal number of new/contemporary works, both those that use customary materials and form and those that incorporate new media and ideas—with the historic material. Again—my main objective is to convey life and resilience as the take home messages. I’d also like to continue to expand the incorporation of Native perspectives in the galleries—Native film and photography, spoken word and music.

EJ: You have said that continuing the NAGPRA process will be one of your first priorities in your new job at the PAM. Given the breadth and extent of the Museum’s Native American collection (i.e. over 5000 articles representing over 200 cultural groups), how will you go about tackling this job?

DD-N: Much of the work has been done. Inventories went out in 1995 and there are currently 16 active claims. My goal is first to address those claims, next will be to send out inventories of objects that have been accessioned since 1995, and then to resend original inventories—knowing that a lot has changed in Indian Country since then. Ultimately, it’s all about relationships—creating them one at a time—with the people AND with the ancestral objects in the vault.

EJ: You have also mentioned that your greatest joy as a curator has been working closely with the Native American community’s different tribes. Can you mention some of the ways you’ve gone about doing this in the past and how you hope to proceed in the future?

DD-N: As a displaced Native person myself, of course I am happiest when I’m surrounded by extended family and Tribal culture. The joy in my work as a curator comes from facilitating connection between communities and the vital cultural knowledge held in museums. Watching pain and loss transformed through revitalization efforts heals my spirit, too. Here is an example: The first little exhibit I curated at the University of Oregon showcased “master and apprentice” weavers from the nine Oregon tribes. The story that emerged was one that encompassed Termination, loss of knowledge, displacement and suffering—as well as resilience, intertribal cultural sharing and mentoring, love and healing. It was intense. There was even a facet that honored the ancestral baskets held in museum collections as the “masters”—and the museum people as the vital bridges enabling relationships between those baskets and the “apprentices” (the living weavers). The stories are much more complex, personal and beautiful than we anticipate at the start—when we (museum geeks) think of a great “theme” for an exhibit. It is through these kinds of stories that the public learns (through relating and caring) about Native histories, struggles, and contemporary lives and can then become our allies in revitalization and healing.

I think it’s vital for museums with Native American holdings to have a Native American Advisory Council. Ideally a council made up of a representative sample—with an emphasis on representation from the local Tribes/community. Setting goals with the advisors as well as goals that are aligned with goals of the local people are key. I learned early in life that when you are a visitor in a place, you always ask permission of the local people. If I am charged with exhibiting, interpreting, and collecting Native American Art, it would be bad manners to assume I know what’s best on my own. I know many people in the Pacific Northwest and have great friends in the Native community. I’ll build upon these relationships and together we will set the course for the NA collection at the Portland Art Museum.

EJ: I understand that you set up the “Truth vs Twilight” blog to counter the many cultural misrepresentations about Native Americans in the Twilight movies. This seems like an effective way to reach “new demographics,” as they say. Do you intend to set up other blogs to counter stereotypes and misrepresentations related to Native American art? (Note: Our instructor, Wendy Red Star, showed our class a short video on YouTube that I’m sure you will appreciate: in YouTube enter Ryan Red Corn New Moon Wolf Pack Auditions)

DD-N: Yes. I think that the internet is an inexpensive and effective way to reach new audiences and can provide an alternative narrative. This “venue” can be used in lieu of an exhibition (the California Indian Narrative Project) or to complement one, such as the Truth vs. Twilight site.

EJ: I noticed that you were the Project Manager for the “Carrying Traditions Across The Waters of Time: Ainu and Northwest Cultural Collaborations” Project. I’m struck by how common wide-ranging cultural exchange was in traditional Native American culture. For example, here in the Pacific Northwest there were two major vibrant continental trade centers at Celilo Falls and, further up the Columbia, at Kettle Falls. Even in modern days, the forced mix of Native cultures in urban areas resulted in great artistic and political energy (such as AIM). How do you think those historic trade relationships influenced traditional Native American arts? Do you see that historic quality of openness to new ideas and products and cultures evident in Native American art today? Do you see that quality in professional interactions among Native American curators?

DD-N: People have been sharing traditions since the beginning of time. Whether forced together or brought together through trade, ideas and inspiration are part of human interaction. So, yes — absolutely. I find it especially fulfilling to be around other Native professionals and though my experience with other Native curators is rather limited I think this blog that Wendy has initiated will help me hear their views and connect with them on a more intimate level—so, THANKS Wendy!

EJ: I understand that you are finishing up a book on Native American culture. Could you tell us something about the scope and purpose of the book?

DD-N: It’s more about museums and their impacts on Native communities than it is on Native culture, per se. It’s based on my dissertation research which analyzed California museum narratives juxtaposed with lived experiences and testimonies of California Indian people. I have been working with University of Nebraska Press and hope to have a draft to them by next year at this time.

EJ: I’ve read that you are a Bioneer. How do you integrate the Bioneer concepts with your curatorial philosophy?

DD-N: I think that we all need to be thinking about sustainable ways to live on this planet. Bioneers are doing that, through work with practitioners of traditional ecological knowledge. I believe that we can address respect for the stewardship of the land in our work, whether it be in a Natural History institution or Art Museum. An NSF funded initiative called the “Cosmic Serpent” (which I am involved) brought together western science folks and Native knowledge holders with museum professionals to develop ways to integrate earth knowledge and care into the informal learning environment. It was extremely powerful to learn that we actually all have the same goal—to continue to inhabit this beautiful home we inherited. My goal for the PAM Native American galleries and programs is one of integration. We can easily speak of the natural world and cultural knowledge through Native American Art. I think it’s our responsibility to do so.

EJ: How do you define Contemporary Native American/First Nations art? Does Contemporary Native art need to be defined differently from mainstream art?

DD-N: Rooted in Native American culture and identity, whether it’s evident in the art itself or the artist alone. Does it need to be defined differently? No, not necessarily. Some Native people choose to work in mainstream media and theoretical frames. It is still Native American Art if the artist identifies as Native American. However, it is unique in that it is influenced by Native American cultures, languages, traditional knowledge, community, and spiritual understandings. Much Native American art is embedded in a milieu of identity and history. However, an artist from any culture and background should have the prerogative to show her work free of any context and identity—Native Americans should not be an exception to that rule.

EJ: There are many museums, galleries, grants and residencies that require documentation of ancestry or tribal enrollment in order to apply or show in their programs. What are your thoughts on using the blood quantum system as a means to determine indigenous identity? Do you think there is a better system that could be used? What are some of the pros and cons when using the government standards for tribal enrollment?

DD-N: Whoa. Big question…

I think culture and community connections should be considered more closely than biology. Blood Quantum may render us extinct eventually, whereas our cultures are strong. Artists infuse our cultures with life and to exclude some of them from needed support and encouragement of their craft due to a definition created by outsiders, is ludicrous. In California, Tribal members are being dis-enrolled at an alarming rate. Should they be excluded from an opportunity because of a political (possibly economic) decision? While granting agencies and museums don’t have the time or resources to conduct research on every applicant, there are ways to “document” community connections and culture. We need to become more creative.

EJ: Can you recommend another curator that we should interview for this blog in the future?

DD-N: Lisa Watt (Seneca, Portland resident)

Resources:

http://www.coastalartbeat.ca/?tag=deana-dartt-newton Announces PAM appointment and her plans to focus first on NAGPRA and development of a Native American Advisory Board.

http://uoalumni.com/s/1202/blank.aspx?sid=1202&gid=1&pgid=1456 Announces PAM appointment. Chumash ancestry. Her greatest joy as a curator has been working closely with the Native American community’s different tribes.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/ent_impact_arts/print.html?entry=/2011/10/portland-art-museum-appoints-d.html Announces PAM appointment. Will oversee the Museum’s Native American collection, assemble collection and finish writing a book on Native American culture. Received BA MA and PhD from UofO. PAM ready for new look and new approach…it’s a blank canvas.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/potm/2009-02-16/ Got into field when enlisted by her tribe(in1998) to accompany a large archeological collection to the University of Oregon and participate in its analysis. While there,became aware of a dire need fo native representation in museums; dissertation addresses this issue in the area of the Central Coast of California.

http://depts.washington.edu/native/people/ddartt.html Announcement of earlier appointment to U. of Washington Dept of American Indian Studies. Research examines issues of Native American representation in museums and the role museums play in public or collective memory about Native peoples. Dissertation examines the dominant “take home” messages in museums.

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/9926 Synopsis of dissertation: “Negotiating the Master Narrative: Museums and the Indian/Californio Community of California’s Central Coast.”

http://www.washington.edu/students/icd/S/ais/475ddartt.html U of Washington class description for “Special Topics In Indian Studies”

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/quileute?before=1323404673 Click on Truth Vs. Twilight. Refers to website set up by DD-N to correct misrepresentations of Quileutes in Twilight movies.

http://www.burkemuseum.org/static/truth_vs_twilight/quileutes.php As above.

http://www.burkemuseum.org/ethnology/research Carrying Traditions Across The Waters of Time: Ainu and Pacific Northwest Cultural Collaborations. DD-N Project Manager of this Project.

http://www.bioneers.org/presenters/dr.-deana-dartt-newton-ph.d and http://www.bioneers.org/about DD-N Presenter with Bioneers

Da-ka-xeen Mehner - Tlingit/N'ishga

wredstarresearchcenter — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:55:00 -0500

Interview by Catherine Cooper

Winter 2011

Catherine Cooper: Your artwork sends very powerful messages. Examples I think of are Blood Work with the cutting of your multicolored beard and the photo 7/16th with your Native American identification information superimposed on a photo of your face. Also, the photos of you in the hanging cage in your early photography work engaged my mind with images of a pseudo type of freedom. The hidden figure wrapped in barbed wire from Surviving also sticks in my mind. What ideas are you driven to communicate through your artwork?

11 Years of Beards

Da-ka-xeen Mehner: The ideas I try to convey change over time, but at the heart of the work I feel like I do what most artists are doing, defining myself in the time and space that I live. The Surviving and early works were a way for me to process my childhood. Growing up with all the trappings of the urban Indian experience, poverty, alcoholism both with my family and my own wrestlings with alcohol, abuse and the shame and hiding of all these things that came out in the early work. With the blood work and the 7/16 I want to communicate to the world that we as Native people have this system of identification placed upon us. It is a system that creates a schism in the collective minds of Native people. It is a system that I find many people do not know about, every time I show the piece there are at least a few people I have to explain the CIB card to.

7-16th

CC: I am currently studying photography. This term my project involves self-portraits and is titled Plural Identity. This feels like a highly self-revealing project. Blood Work and some of your early photography work involve a lot of self-portraiture. The staged photos from Reinterpretation Gallery 2 also involve self-portraits. What leads you to use self-portraiture as a form of expression?

DM: I find self-portraiture to be a great way to examine the self in relation to the world. I feel free to comment on large issues but centered from a personal perspective. I was once asked if I thought of myself as a political artist, and I never felt comfortable speaking for anyone else, but myself. I can make work about the “blood-quantum” system or the construct of historical photographs, which affects all Native Americans, but from my own personal vantage point.

My Cage

Survive

Transmitter to the Gods

My Tatoo

CC: I read in the article, Mixed Medium by Sarah Henning, that you began drawing when you were young and that you were encouraged to develop your talent. Who were your strongest influences and how did you come to use the camera as your art medium in your early work?

DM: My Uncle is an artist, Larry McNeil, and he has had a great impact on my life and art. He gave me my first medium and large formant cameras. It was his influence that got me interested in photography; I was at IAIA when he showed me the magic of Polaroid type 55 film. I still use those cameras, when I use film. His work and career have always been an inspiration and made me believe that art as a career was possible for me.

Da-ka-xeen Mehner with uncle Larry McNeil

CC: Which of your projects are you most proud of? Which one is your favorite?

DM: Well it always seems that I am most engaged with my current work, but looking back there are two projects that I feel are my best works. First are the Reinterpretation series of photos. In going through the museum archives online, I stumbled across a description of an image of a Tlingit man named Da-yuk-hene, which is almost certainly a phonetic variation of my name, Da-ka-xeen. This launched me on an examination of photographic visual history. Case and Draper in Juneau, Alaska took that image in 1906. As I studied our visual history and writings on Native Americans, I realized that it is an outsider view of my culture that I am left with. The Case and Draper images are a perfect example of the constructed identity of Native-ness through the lens of the “other”. I feel a need to deconstruct the images of the past. Reinterpreting the image, I reconstruct the pose but with the tools I use on a daily basis. The camera I had received from my Uncle, and the adz I had made for myself and wearing the jacket my mother had given me for my wedding day. In each image I change the text to reflect my presence in the reinterpreted image. By mirroring this image, I attempt to reflect both the truth and fiction of this history. This mirrored format is derived from the bilateral form-line design structure commonly found in carved screens. What is fact and what is false in our photographic history taken by others is vague. They exist side by side and for me, reflecting and reconstructing these images helps me identify both. By reversing the archival image, I attempt to reverse the history constructed about Native peoples.

Native Photographer

The Thlinget Artist

Reflection

Alone with his Thoughts

The second would be the Weapons of Mass Defense, a series of 8’ tall steel sculptures based on Tlingit fighting knives, commonly known as “double-headed daggers.” These were weapons only used in warfare, but in my artwork I think of them as defensive weapons to protect culture.

Weapons of Mass Defense

Da-ka-xeen Mehner with Weapons of Defense

CC: Your creativity comes out with a strong Native American tone, yet the style of your work is non-traditional. For example, although mask making is a strong part of Tlingit cultures, when I look at your masks and look at masks made long ago by Tlingit people, yours have a unique look. In what ways does traditional Tlingit style influence your work and artistic processes?

DM: I was always aware of my culture, but it wasn’t until I started my graduate work at The Native Art Center here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks that I really started to draw directly from the material culture of my people. It was the first time that in my education that I felt free to make Tlingit art history the center of my artistic practice and draw from its forms for inspiration. Tlingit artistic style permeates my work. The bilateral design of the form-line design can be seen in quite a bit of my photography, although the form-line has been replaced with photographic imagery the structure is the same. Double-headed daggers, bentwood boxes, masks all are part of the visual language that I work with and are direct references of Tlingit material culture.

Performing the Mask

Weapons of Mass Defense

CC: I feel cultural identity is a big aspect of maturing as a person and as a community. I, too, am “multi-racial” and have always looked to any of my ancestral background for guidance and identity. This is not an easy thing to do for many people. Given your multi-cultural background, what is your perception of the Native American artist community in regards to recognition of Native American art? Would you consider a non-registered Native American’s artwork as “Native American”?

DM: This is a tricky question, and one that I am constantly thinking about. Now I want to be clear, it seems that you are asking specifically about artist with native ancestry, but for whatever reason are not registered. In that case I would have no problem considering that person as a Native American artist. I do not believe we should let the government define who we are.

Untitled Assemblage

Untitled Assemblage

CC: Will you share a bit of what your next project will be?

DM: My son has just turned 2 recently and is fascinated with Tlingit drumming and dancing. I’ve been going through and relearning a number of our songs and have started on some work about that process. I’ve been looking at the drum itself as a form of inspiration, with some video aspect in the work, myself singing the songs, and projected on the drums. This work has all just begun and I’m not sure where it will go, but that’s what I’m working on now.

CC: What advice do you offer aspiring artists?

DM: Take advantage of every opportunity out there, they are all around you, you just have to look. Be honest with your work, if you are true to your work, people will notice. And just to keep at it, keep making, keep showing, and keep thinking.

Biography: Da-ka-xeen Mehner

Da-ka-xeen Mehner (Tlingit/N’ishga) uses the tools of family ancestry and personal history to build his art. Born in Fairbanks, Alaska to a Tlingit/N’ishga Mother and Hippy/American father his work stems from an examination of a multicultural heritage and social expectations and definitions. Da-ka-xeen was raised in two environments, one as an urban Native in Anchorage and the other as a rural Hippy in Fairbanks living without electricity, running water or phones, and heating the house with a wood stove. In particular his work has focused on the constructs of Native American identity, and an attempt to define the Self outside of these constructs. He uses the materials and tools of his family to express himself. From the steel and concrete of his Labor Union father, to the crook knife and cedar of his Alaska Native ancestors, Da-ka-xeen Mehner’s artwork reflects his heritage. In an expanded view of “tradition,” Da-ka-xeen also includes the inherited tools and skills of photography that were passed down to him from his maternal Uncles.

Da-ka-xeen received his A.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. From 1994-2000 Mehner served as the founder and director of Site 21/21, a contemporary art gallery in Albuquerque, NM, and was a founding member/owner of the (Fort) 105 Art Studios in downtown Albuquerque in 1998. Da-ka-xeen returned to Alaska in 2000 and earned his M.F.A in Native Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

His work in photography and sculpture has been exhibited from New York to California; Alaska to New Mexico. Collections include the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the University of Alaska Museum of the North (Fairbanks, AK), and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (Santa Fe, NM), and the Alaska State Museum (Juneau, AK). His work has been featured in the art magazines Sculpture and American Indian Art, and in numerous newspapers, art catalogs, and blogs. He is an Assistant Professor of Native Arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the director of the UAF Native Arts Center.

Resources:

http://www.da-ka-xeen.com/

Art Art Zine - Female Artist! Run!

wredstarresearchcenter — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:22:35 -0500

Art Art Zine - Female Artist! Run!:

The lovely Amelia Winger-Bearskin came to Portland, Oregon to check out the art happenings with the Social Practice conference Open Engagement. She also stopped by my (Wendy Red Star) studio for a little visit about the Contemporary North American Indigenous Artists blog.

Here is some more information about Art Art Zine.

Art Art Zine is a female artist run publication dedicated to publishing original writing about art and society. While we are especially inclusive of artists and writers from off-center cities in the South, we accept submissions from around the world. We are particularly interested in providing space for experimental and innovative writing that may include the use of new media in its presentation and content.

We encourage timely responses utilizing video, web, new media, sound, and text-based work. With vast definitions of “art” and “art worlds,” Art Art Zine is dedicated to providing a forum for original discussion of contemporary art, while promoting and redefining the role of an online publication in the arts community.

http://www.artartzine.com/

Natalie M. Ball - Modoc/Klamath

wredstarresearchcenter — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:48:00 -0500

Interview by Katie Zerzan

Winter 2011

Untitled, 2009

Katie Zerzan: How long have you been making art? Has it always been something you wanted to pursue?

Natalie M. Ball: I started painting when I was in undergraduate school at the University of Oregon. I was about 21 and had a young daughter when I entered college. I was majoring in Ethnic Studies and took a painting class as an elective my junior year. After that I was hooked and decided to double major in fine arts. For the next year and a half I took any fine arts class that I could. I always liked art or creating things since I was a kid, but I wasn’t traditionally trained in any medium. I never wanted to be or planned to be an artist as I am defined now. It just happened really.

Incident At Fort Klamath, 2009

KZ: Do you consider yourself solely a Native American artist? Did the issues of blood quantum lead you to make work focused on Native American history? You have such an interesting background. Have you thought about including African history in your artwork?

NMB: Nah. My ancestry is the core of my work, my white and blackness is located and defined within a Native American identity, I guess you can say. But I try hard to not let myself stay stuck within that identity. I’m looking more at the idea of race as a social construct that can shift and change.

I think my experiences as an Indian lead me to focus on my Native American history and my life experiences. I can’t relate to the dominant images or histories or publicized realities of Native America. I find them really stuffy and static. Blood quantum is just an apparatus, one of many, which dictates our identity. I look specifically at my family and tribal history and its effect on us.

In a nutshell, my artwork is my attempt at meshing historical narratives with counter memory, a type of political fantasy, to warrant suspicion as to what is the truth in order to challenge inconsistent and problematic historical narratives belonging to Native America. I like to gut things.

Untitled, 2009

KZ: Your resume is impressive it seems like you started exhibiting as soon as you graduated. What path are you considering as far as a career in art?

NMB: I want to keep traveling and exhibiting. That’s what kept me so interested in my art. I was able to travel the world with my kid in tow, now I have added another kid to the picture and I plan to bring her along as well.

I want to introduce other media to my installations as well and see what I can do with them.

As a mama, as an Indigenous mama, I love what I do. I am proud of myself, that I am able to be a mama and give my kids experiences that can give them a better understanding of who they are. I’m trying to teach them to say “fuck you, this is who I am”… or something like it. It took me a while to be able to say that!

CAMP, 2007

KZ: Camp is really nice with the juxtaposition of new and old figures. Is this piece commenting on the supposed ‘evolvement’ of reservation life represented by the figures in the picture that were perhaps taken on a reservation?

NMB: That was one of my first pieces I ever made. I like it. It was before I knew what I wanted to talk about, before I had the lingo of the fine arts world, and the lingo that I needed to be able to talk about race, and before I really located myself. So it’s probably the coolest piece I will ever make! I am related to the woman on the far right. I found this photograph and wanted to insert myself somehow (that’s me in the purple bathing suit) and wanted to see what that looked like. It’s more of a reflection, really a starting point.

KZ: Are there specific or consistent misrepresentations of Native Americans that guide your work?

NMB: There are so many. I would say a couple that perpetuate Indians in a problematic way would be ethnographic photography, and other Indian artists.

KZ: On your website I enjoyed reading your artist statement about the Modoc Ghost Dance ceremonies. With your background in Ethnic Studies combined with Indigenous Visual Arts, do you feel like it is your job to educate the viewer by providing the history?

NMB: Hmmm. I don’t think it’s my job to educate the viewer anymore. Early on I did. I think it’s my job to be able to critically question and talk about the issues I locate and to be honest.

Daddy’s Outfit, 2008

KZ: I see some repeated similarities between you and Jean Michael Basquiat, especially in the quilt pieces, Savages, Daddy’s Outfit, Reload, and Three Women. I find it interesting that he was pulling from his background of being Haitian and you are pulling from your varied background. Have you had this comparison before, or can you see similarities?

NMB: I would have married that man if he had stuck around longer! Joking aside, I am a fan of his work for sure. I came to art without much exposure to the art world or other artists. I found out about him a couple years ago. People have compared our work and yes, I do see the similarities.

Reload, 2008

Three Women, 2008

The Savages, 2009

KZ: You work with a lot of different mediums photography, painting, and sewing. Which medium did you start out with first and how did you expand to other mediums? Is there a medium that you feel more comfortable with or enjoy more?

NMB: I started painting and evolved into installation (textiles, figurative sculpture (dolls), and audio) two years ago. The installation you are pulling from is my first one. I think it’s an expected progression for me.

Circa Indian, 2009 (Installation View)

Circa Indian, 2009 (Installation View)

KZ: Did your degree in Ethnic Studies and Indigenous Visual Arts lead you to create your works about so-called “hidden histories”? What was it like going to school in New Zealand?

NMB: My time spent in New Zealand was needed. In a lot of ways, their Indigenous art scene is light years ahead of ours for many reasons. For three years I was able to have great dialog and to develop my ideas about my art. I needed to witness that and come home to start my own path separate from what other Indian artists are doing.

KZ: I noticed you show a lot in other countries. What has your experience been with audiences outside of the U.S. are they able to connect with your work?

NMB: Funny you ask. I am still unable to get many shows in the states. My work is more accepted, or wanted outside of the US. I could speculate on that, but that’s for another time. Outside of the US, even just up in Canada, they are open to connecting with my work. I think that’s the difference between the US & the rest of the world—being open.

The Savages, 2009 (detail)

KZ: What will you be working on next?

NMB: Right now I am working on three new bodies of work for a few shows this spring/summer, one of which is in the US! I am developing my dolls and the audio component of the installation. I am really excited about my dolls, I find them creepy and that’s their beauty.

I have been invited to the New York Smithsonian for an Indigenous conference as a panelist this spring. When I was invited I said to myself, “I’m not that ‘Indian!’.” Funny how my work and my discourse about Indian has lead me to the hub of Indian art. I am excited to talk about what Indian is to me in that space, because I think there is room for my kind of Indian.

Natalie M. Ball- Bio

Addressing issues of authenticity from questioning the role of blood quantum and tribal belonging to practices of ethnographic portraiture, I examine internal and external discourses that shape Indian identity through contemporary installation art. I believe historical discourses of Native Americans have constructed a limited and inconsistent visual archive that currently misrepresents our past experiences and misinforms current expectations.

As I excavate hidden histories, dominant narratives are artistically deconstructed through a theoretical framework of auto-ethnography. Painted quilts made of vintage and antique textiles, fabrics, and clothing are partnered with figurative sculpture then utilized to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses in order to rebuild a new visual genealogy in refusal to line-up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans. Each hand-made doll and painted star-quilt carries a new auto-ethnographic narrative, a new history, and a new manifestation for a healthier and a more critical way to understand Native America.

Because auto-ethnography refers to the self, my location as a descendent of African slaves, English soldiers, and a great great granddaughter of Kientpaush, also known as Captain Jack who led Modoc resistance during the Modoc War of 1872 informs my work. Within the thematic focus of my work and because of my descendancy, it is here where my artistic approach and interest lies.

With degree in Ethnic Studies and Indigenous Visual Arts, my work is always in discussion with racial narratives critical to understanding of both the self and the nation and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories. Because my work is not limited textually it goes beyond the language of memory to allow for witnessing that does not diminish the past or the present. The past is not the past.

My installations are visual invites for participation in new auto-ethnographic narratives by creating an inclusive space for negotiating identity, history, and experiences. This will give evidence of the plurality of my history and allow me to stand as a microcosm within history.

Resources:

http://NATALIEMBALL.COM/home.html

http://www.artcentral.ca/bulletins/118-natalie-m-ball-indian-circumvented

http://www.artcriesout.com/artist/nball.html

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith - Salish/Kootenai

wredstarresearchcenter — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:38:00 -0400

Interview by Shilo George

Winter 2011

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Salish/Kootenai, French Cree, Shoshone, enrolled member of the Flathead Nation, born 1940 at the St. Ignatius Jesuit Mission on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation in Montana.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s artwork is multi-layered, complex, and deeply personal. The more time I spent looking at her work (which spans forty-years) the more impressed I became with her uncompromising tenacity, humor, quiet outrage, and vocal opinion about topics like identity, cultural preservation, environmental preservation, and war. As the viewer I found myself falling into her compositions and swimming in the rich layers, visual textures, colors, messages, and symbols that permeate her work. I’m particularly drawn to her continued use of dripping paint, her use of bright colors that are often saturated, and her use of Native American cultural icons such as a buckskin dress, petroglyphs, and anthropomorphic animals. It should also be noted that she is extremely skilled at setting up her compositions so that she guides the viewer throughout the work.

If the viewer is to really understand and appreciate the complexity of her work, they must have a good understanding of not only art history but Native American history, cultural icons, and current events. Smith pulls from all of these sources to create layers built in narrative and point-of-view that are incased in each print or painting. Cultural perspective and worldview is important to both recognize the individual elements of her compositions at the same time as viewing the total meaning of the composition as this is imperative to understanding her world vision.

In addition to Smith’s impressive artworks, she also plays an important role in Native American contemporary arts curation, lecturer, teacher, and activist. Smith has created hundreds of prints and paintings, lectured at over 185 colleges and universities, has had over 90 solo exhibits and curated or organized over 30 Native American exhibitions. After reading extensively about her work and accomplishments I kept wondering if she has the same number of hours in the day as the rest of us do. She continues to be a champion for her fellow contemporary Native American artists and has worked tirelessly over her career to create support, appreciation, and validation for the importance of contemporary Native American artwork.

Not only is Smith generous in her approach to working with Native artists, but she also uses her own funds to create exhibits and support other artists. She was equally giving, open, and generous with her time in answering all of my questions and helping me to understand her vision and passion for art and Native American culture.

Ghost Dance Dress, 2001 Lithograph, Missoula Museum of Art

Horse Sense, 1994, Lithograph, Missoula Museum of Art

Indian Heart, 1993, Lithographic/Collage, Missoula Museum of Art

Shilo George: Through this Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist class we have often discussed the issue of Indian identity and the artist. We have looked at the work of a few artists who reject or are uncomfortable with being labeled a Native American artist. Usually it’s because they do not want to be limited to one style, topic, or medium viewed by the larger art world as “Native American Art.” As a Native American artist, have you ever had a family member, community member, fellow artist, art critic, or teacher view your work and comment on your unique mixed media technique or subject matter and questioned if it was really Native American art? If yes, what was the circumstance and how did you address that person’s comment? What would you say to another Native American artist who feels uncomfortable with being labeled a Native American artist?

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: I’ve had comments on my art about it being too Native and also not being Native enough. When Emmi Whitehorse and I were in school at the same time, she was an undergrad and I was a grad student, we both had comments from professors that our work was too Indian in appearance. We both made abstract work that I called “mark making” to deter these professors. Later when I founded the Grey Canyon Artists and sought exhibition venues for the group, I was told that our contemporary work wasn’t “Indian” enough in appearance. This commentary was a disavowal of who we were as a people. It meant that others had the power to decide the merit or value of our artwork based on racial stereotyping. It’s thought that Native Americans made collage before Europeans. Take a look at our antiquities and you will see a variety of materials collaged together. Remember after Bastille Day in France, traders brought silks to trade with the Indians. Ribbon shirts and appliqué used these silks, which is another form of collage. Collage is a fitting material for economically poor and disenfranchised people. Native artists vary in how they want to be viewed either as a mainstream artist or as an American Indian artist. I think that’s a personal choice.

Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, Mixed Media

SG: I enjoyed looking at your work in the book titled She Paints The Horse. It is interesting to see how your style and media changes from year to year and sometimes painting to painting, however the stylization and gestures of the horse rarely changes. Was this purposeful when you were creating the art or putting that particular collection together? Or was it just the way it happened when you were in your creating process?

JQTSS: The catalog She Paints the Horse covers perhaps 30 years or more of my painting and drawing horses. I rode my horse Cheyenne for about 20 years while I used him for my model. I chose two pieces of work to represent a whole series of the many series that I did all those years. Several of those series contained 100 to 200 pieces of work. So what you see in this catalog is a tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of pieces of work that exist. There is a jump from page to page, which means those two works might represent a year to two years of work. During that same time I was also working on other artwork that did not have a horse image. Some of the horse images were made just for my own pleasure, not particularly for sale purposes.

SG: Looking at the painting War Horse, 2005, I was drawn to the painting’s pastel colors that run throughout the composition. As my eyes continued to move around the painting I was struck by the juxtaposition of skulls littering the ground and I can’t help but see them as happy. The horse in the center is shown as grounded, strong, and solid. This conflicts with what I see as bullet wounds or scars depicted in the paint splatters and running paint on the body of the horse. As I look closer at the horse I see that his hair is covering his eyes. Is he blind to the death around him or could he be innocent? Who is the horned, serpent character in front of the horse that seems happy and like he stepped out of a children’s cartoon? I also noticed another references to cartoon animation with the hand dropping the birds into the composition at the top right. After examining the composition I finally noticed the smiling cartoon-the figure of the little girl peaking at me from the left side of the canvas. I had the feeling that she had been watching me the whole time I studied the painting and was laughing at me. What was the message you were trying to convey with this painting?

War Horse, 2002, Painting

JQTSS: I am a post modernist messenger as one curator labeled me and I think that label fits. It means that I take images from any historical period and from anywhere including color books, advertising, wallpaper etc. The horned serpent is the devil from a Jose Guadalupe Posada print. He was a Mexican printmaker who lived in the late 1800’s. He made his political prints criticizing the Mexican government and sold them on the street corners hoping to enlighten people. The skulls are also taken from his prints and yes, he often drew them in a cartoonish way perhaps thinking they might have more appeal to people, encouraging them to purchase his prints. There is also a Mickey Mouse hand in the upper right hand corner which reminds us of the culture vulture Walt Disney, and the attempt to spread American corporate culture throughout the world. This painting entitled War Horse is about the American invasion of Iraq, which will go down in history as a despicable act of war, which has killed, perhaps 100,000 people or more, both Americans and Iraqis. This is an anti-war painting. Note the guy floating in the sky he represents “Star Wars” weapons that Reagan was so enthusiastic about spending exorbitant amounts of money on. Also note that he carries a spear, my commentary on the effectiveness of our high tech equipment fighting people who are barefoot and on donkeys. With all our pricey high tech gear, we still can’t locate Osama Bin Laden. The horned figure (the devil) holds a mask which is the piece of sculpture that was stolen from the Iraqi museum during the invasion, in fact, millions of dollars of irreplaceable artworks were stolen from there. When told that this was happening, Rumsfeld made a comment in retort something like “who cares about a bunch of old dusty pots.” These guys are the representatives of Columbus of our time; they are corporate and have no morals or scruples. Few galleries and museums are interested in political art today. I felt very lucky that the Nicolaysen Museum allowed me to display this painting. Wyoming is a very conservative state. Showing it there was like being in the Lion’s den.

SG: Since the 1970’s you have played many roles in gaining the notice of the larger art world to the importance, brilliance, and variety of Native American contemporary art. I’m interested in how you define your role as a curator of Native American contemporary art and how does your definition conflict and/or go together with the contemporary European idea of art curation? Why is/was the role of curator important for you to take on?

JQTSS: In the mid 1970’s when I began curating or organizing exhibitions for Native artists, it was about having contemporary Native art seen. There were pots, blankets, jewelry, and IAIA painting and sculpture being shown in Santa Fe at that time, but those of us who were educated in mainstream universities were being ignored and we still are nearly 40 years later. The emphasis for collectors and museums is still on crafts. Yes, there is a difference between my curation and Euro-American curation. A curator who acts as judge and jury emphasizes that their knowledge or years of training is on a much higher plane than an artist with years of training and experience. I don’t want Native artists to feel discounted or demeaned about their work so I plan in advance who will be invited to an exhibition. I have much respect for our Native artists who often have tight budgets. I don’t want to stress their time and money. It’s more than belittling to receive a notice that you’ve been dumped; it’s also the cost of photography and preparing their materials that is problematic for them. We get that in the mainstream so I’m not willing to do that to my tribal kin. I’m not infallible. Sure my years of experience offer some educated judgment but it’s enough for me that they’ve earned a certain position of respect. I’m likely to get beat up over this commentary but since I’ve spent nearly 40 years doing my curatorial work this way I have a long-term commitment to this method of curating.

The Sacred, 1996, Lithograph, Missoula Museum of Art

SG: In an article by Native American artist, Gail Tremblay, written for the Missoula Art Museum, Tremblay notes that the Missoula Art Museum has the largest collection of your prints than any other art museum in the country. That you donate one print from every edition you make. Are you still donating prints to them? Why did you make the decision to donate your work instead of asking for compensation?

JQTSS: If I had asked for compensation, I doubt that this amount of my work would be in the MAM collection. The big leap here was attaining permission from the board to do this. Museums generally will accept one or two pieces but unless you are a blue chip artist such as Pat Steir or Chuck Close, you aren’t likely to have a museum accept this amount of work. So you can look at this in two ways. I want to look at it in a positive light and with pride, especially since this is in a 60 miles proximity to my reservation (the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation.)

War is Heck, 2002, Lithograph/Chine Colle, Missoula Museum of Art

SG: In a lecture that you gave at the Eitelijorg Fellowship in 2007 you talked about going to college for art and that at the end of the year your professor told you that women could not be artists. That you should find another field to go into. Were there other instances during your career where you were discouraged by others to pursue art or other goals due to being a woman? If yes, what was the circumstance and how did you address that person? Looking at the present, where do you see that Native women artists need to make their mark or areas we need to explore? What advice would you give to upcoming Native woman who are entering the art world for the first time?

JQtSS: The year that professor told me that I could not be an artist was 1958. My art classes were all men receiving the GI Bill from the Korean War and the instructor told me that I could draw better than the men, but that women could not be artists. He said I could be a teacher. So eventually I did earn an art education degree. But through hard work I began showing and selling my work while in grad school. I didn’t look back at what that male instructor said, I just kept working. If you read Wilma Mankiller or Faith Ringgold’s biography you will find similar stories. We can’t predict where we’re going in life, but we can have goals and stay focused. So you have to do what you believe in. Do what makes you feel whole and happy. Do what keeps your life in balance.

A Map of Heaven, 2002, Lithograph/Chine Colle, Missoula Museum of Art

SG: The lithograph, “A Map to Heaven,” 2001 seems different from much of your other work in terms of the color palette and the simplicity of the composition. I like the subdued color palette and there’s something comforting about the combination of cream, light green hues, and brown hues. Can you explain your composition choices, the meaning behind it, and some of the images in the background?

JQtSS: I zeroxed a photo of a warshirt to use for my drawing and liked it so much I decided to keep the grey color. Often that’s how I “discover” something. Behind the warshirt is a map I found in a shoebox wrapper (an image of a WWII map of Europe). I created a road to heaven with dollar signs, barbies, falling angels—and since no one has gone there and come back to tell us about it—I put an elder up there with a straight up bonnet (from an old scalp dance photo).

SG: I noted that in many of your prints you worked collaboratively with another artist or printer. In the lithograph, “A Map of Heaven,” can you talk about working collaboratively with chine colle and specifically about your roles in the process of creating the idea for the composition and the printing?

JQtSS: All lithographs are done with a printer in a shop, some monoprints, ImagOn are done in my studio or with my son, the professor, artist and printmaker Neal Ambrose Smith. Chine Colle, means collage pasted using the press.

SG: In an article for Maverick Arts Magazine in 2005 or 2006, the writer reported that when he came to visit you and your husband in New Mexico you were going to start cataloging and organizing your slides and information you had collected over the years about your shows. Where are you in that cataloging process? What will you do with all of the cataloged information? Publishing a book? Will you be creating your own website?

JQtSS: Yes, I’m working on a website now. I want it to be more than a feature for my work, I hope to add educational material to it. The Joan Mitchell Foundation in NY has given me a grant to do this archiving project. They’ve asked me to help write a workbook about the process so they can pass this out to other artists. I’m also beta testing software they are developing just for artists. It will all be given for free, with no fees attached.

Coyote Made Me Do It!, 1993

SG: Irony and humor seems to be a common theme for you through out your work. Can you explain why this is and its connection to Native American culture?

JQtSS: Irony and humor are an important part of Native culture and you readily find it throughout Indian Country and imposed on Indian art. That’s what gets us through the hard times.

Indian Survival Suite: Humor, 1996, Lithograph, Missoula Museum of Art

SG: During my research I’ve read that you have taught art at AIAI, that you continue to give lectures and participate in artist-in-residence both in the US and internationally, and that you particularly like supporting young Native artists. Can you share your teaching philosophy? In your opinion, what are the most important elements, practices, or skills to teach young Native artists?

JQtSS: I encourage students to learn the fundamentals of art, then not be afraid to look everywhere and at everything for their creative impulses. I discourage them from trying to follow a style or to copy from a book, because they think that will generate sales. That only serves to make stale art. They should keep at their art making, get into their own zone and allow that mystery to take over their creativity.

Trade Canoe for Don Quixote, 2005, Painting/Mixed Media, Denver Art Museum

SG: During my continued research about your work and your process, I found that the Denver Art Museum has an educational lesson plan for K-5th grade students. The lesson plan revolves around your work, “Trade Canoe for Don Quixote.” Have you seen any of the K-5th grade students work based on your piece?

Denver Art Museum’s educational lesson plan based on Smith’s work, Trade Canoe for Don Quixote:http://creativity.denverartmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Smith_Elem.pdf

JQtSS: No, I haven’t been to the DAM museum. (No pun intended.)

Rancher, 2002, Acrylic on Canvas, Hood Museum of Art, Purchased through the William S. Rubin Fund

SG: In many of your works you use appropriated images from many different media sources as symbols to create a comment on a larger theme. I’ve seen commercial ads to historical photos, to newspaper articles and headlines. Are there any sources that are untouchable to you?

JQtSS: I haven’t used porn.

Flight, date unknown, Acrylic, Missoula Museum of Art

SG: In much of your work you use images of petroglyphs and other cultural symbols, many from your tribe. Do you ever use images from other tribes and if so do you research that symbolism to see how that tribe uses them? How do you feel about Native American artists using and appropriating images or symbols from tribes other than their own? Do you think that an artist has a duty to research the cultural symbol and use it the way it was intended?

JQtSS: I always try to be respectful by not pointedly using other tribes symbols. I also am nervous about that, especially knowing that many images are used in ceremonies. However, there are times, I’ve used ancient symbols especially petroglyphs and altered them. Sometimes I’ve found they resemble petroglyphs found in China or Africa. That gives me a freedom knowing they are universal. It’s like knowing the copyright has expired.

SG: What projects are you working on right now and what sources are you drawing from to create that work?

JQtSS: I’m redesigning a section of the Denver Airport terrazzo floor in the Great Hall where they recently pulled the fountain out and asked me and my partner from the floor design twenty years ago to create a jazzy design to replace the fountain 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. I’ve included this design in a group of images I’m sending you soon. The design was just out of my head. Amazing what floats around in there sometimes, but not all of the time.

Images of the Denver Airport terrazzo floor will be included at a later date.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Resources:

Missoula Museum of Art: Smith’s collection as well as several educational lesson plans based on her work.

http://www.missoulaartmuseum.org/index.php/ID/86a8ebb51c61e940af96bf947ff34afb/fuseaction/experience.collectionDetail.htm

Illustrated essay about Smith’s work by Gail Tremblay:

http://www.missoulaartmuseum.org/files/documents/collection/Montana%20Connections_Smith/TremblayEssay.pdf

Flomenhaft Gallery: A collection of her work and information about the artist:

http://www.flomenhaftgallery.com/flomenhaft_gallery_artists_biographies/jaune_quick_to_see_smith_artist_bio.php

Smith’s impressive curriculum vitae and resume:

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/archive/cvs/159.pdf

Beyond Sweetgrass: The Life and Art of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith by Joni L. Murphy, Murphy’s dissertation an Smith’s work for University of Kansas:

http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/5335/1/Murphy_ku_0099D_10101_DATA_1.pdf

A Complete Lesson Plan on creating mixed media collage based on Smith’s work:

http://learningtogive.org/lessons/unit203/lesson3.html

Denver Art Museum’s educational lesson plan based on Smith’s work, Trade Canoe for Don Quixote:

http://creativity.denverartmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Smith_Elem.pdf

Sonny Assu - Laich-kwil-tach (Kwakwaka'wakw)

wredstarresearchcenter — Tue, 31 May 2011 02:23:19 -0400

Phone Interview by Crystal Baxley

Spring 2011

I had the opportunity to interview Sonny Assu, a Vancouver-based artist of Laich-kwil-tach (Kwakwaka’wakw) heritage. I was immediately attracted to the balance of criticality and humor that I saw in Sonny’s work, especially the Breakfast Series and 1884/1951. In other works I identified traditional Northwest Coast formline influences mixed with the bright colors and styles of Street Art, and I was very curious to ask Sonny about the melding of these two influences in his artistic practice. I also appreciated his criticality towards consumerism, exemplified by using modern pop-culture symbols such as the iPod and Coca-Cola sign. The recognizability of these symbols pushed me into learning more about the issues that they were representing, historical aboriginal rights issues like the use of Coast-Salish land for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the history of the Potlatch ban in Canada. Sonny’s work combines aesthetically pleasing colors and forms with humor and modern imagery, a combination that is interesting to look at but also leaves the viewer thinking.

Sonny Assu, Coke Salish

Crystal Baxley: Thanks a lot for talking with me today. I’d like to start with a question about a specific painting in the Longhouse Series. The piece in that series that really sticks out to me is the Authentic Aboriginal 2010 Olympic Commission painting. The reason that it sticks out to me is the title because I’m not sure if it is sincere. Based on your writing and other works that I’ve seen, the title seems like it is probably being critical and I wanted to ask you to elaborate on that piece specifically.

Sonny Assu: You’re welcome, thank you for contacting me about my work. It is meant to be critical of the two week party that Vancouver hosted last year. The part in brackets isn’t really part of the title, it speaks to the series that it was an offshoot of, and the fact that it was an Olympic commission. I’ve actually had internal debates with myself about being commissioned for the Olympics. I never supported the games invading Vancouver, but once the ball was in motion there wasn’t really anything to do but sit back and watch it all happen. Unfortunately now we are looking at the system in Vancouver where we are seeing services being cut and people are not really understanding why. When you get down to it, it’s based on the fact that the Olympics came and we reallocated money towards a two-week party as opposed to paying for hospital beds, housing, helping homeless people or other social responsibilities.

Within the commission contract, there was a certain amount of wording stating that you couldn’t have a critical eye on the games and that you couldn’t really make any comments against the games. That was something for me that I struggled with in creating this piece, because personally, with my friends and even publicly on platforms like Facebook and Twitter I was very vocal against the games. So I definitely wanted to have some sort of commentary within the work itself.

The title, Authentic Aboriginal, comes from a failed initiative that was set up by a local Aboriginal business owner who had failed to win the bid to supply the games with all of the stereotypical trinkets and memorabilia (to be created by local crafts people) that panders to the tourist trade. Since he wasn’t awarded the bid, the production of all those trinkets; luggage tags, dream catchers and all of that stereotypical stuff that you see as “authentic indian identity” was farmed out, again to places like China, to be produced there because it’s cheaper.

I don’t remember his name, but he went on the news and proclaimed that he was going to launch a sticker campaign. The premise of the campaign was to denote that If you are an Aboriginal artist and you want to make work in British Columbia (or Canada), that there should be some sort of authoritative body that gives you a sticker and a license to give you the right to call your work “Authentic Aboriginal”. For me, that was something that I was not keen on at all. From my standpoint, I am an Aboriginal person and therefore the work that I make is apart of authentic aboriginal culture, authentic aboriginal art; I don’t need a sticker to say that my work is authentic.

For me it’s an interesting thing to say, because my work sits outside of the perceived notion of “what is authentic aboriginal art?”.

There have been artists interviewed on your blog, such as Terrence Houle and Nicholas Galanin, that are working in the same vein. They want to make contemporary culture that helps promote the idea of authentic aboriginal art and culture.

The piece is titled that way to be an intentional tongue-in-cheek jab at that campaign, which never got off the ground. All in all, it was a commentary on how the games promoted the stereotype of the Indian, the stereotype of the crafts-person over artist. Parading Canada’s aboriginal people out, exploiting their culture, yet ignoring all the problems of colonization.

I was actually pretty worried when I titled the piece because of the clause in the contract about any sort of negative comments against the games. I have a hard time titling work sometimes and I really didn’t want to change the title if they objected. I felt a little bit bound and worried they might not accept the work.

When I was speaking with the art director of the games and I sheepishly told her the title of the piece, she laughed. All the sudden, the anxiety and fear that I was feeling melted away. So I think it was very positive that the art director held up to the artistic integrity of that work and the title and recognized the humorous jab I was making.

Sonny Assu, Authentic Aboriginal

CB: I have questions about other pieces in that series and other pieces that you’ve done as well, which for me read as mixing aboriginal with an aesthetic that is based in street art or hip hop culture and those colors and styles. I was wondering if you could tell me more about the mixture of traditional influences with a contemporary twist?

SA: I think that my style or the direction for my work is definitely the way I need to go to help further the understanding of what is Aboriginal art and culture. Whether it’s Canada or the United States, we have the culture of Aboriginal people that has been now influenced by various outside sources. If you look at Canada’s history for the past at least 150 years, and take into consideration that colonization has been going on in North American for the past 500 years or more, we’re looking at an Aboriginal culture that has been decimated by Western culture but is now taking the influences from it.

I think a lot of aboriginal people, youth especially, are adopting hip-hop culture as their own as a way of expression. They’re taking cues from another oppressed culture. Hip-hop culture came out of the Black community as a way of speaking out against their own oppression and as a way to reclaim their own identity. I think that aboriginal youth are drawing parallels to that culture because they can identify with it. They are now starting to make it their own by inserting their own issues and culturally identify in what they are creating.

In terms of my work, I don’t really think that I’m overtly grabbing items that are being used by street-artist, like graffiti and tagging; I think that I’m appreciating the aesthetic that that street art has. And I’m trying to reinterpret it into my own personal forms to create a discourse on how Aboriginal culture is changing. I don’t think that I’m calling it graffiti; I don’t think that I’d ever call it graffiti, but I think it’s an influence for me, because I see it all around me.

I see my influences onto my own personal culture coming from various different levels. It’s my traditional culture and the Western culture that I grew up in; it’s how we use branding and how we adopt these items of pop culture to dictate our personal linage. It’s sugary breakfast cereals; it’s the brand of soft-drink and type of media we consume. With the iDrum and iPotlatch series, I’m using the iPod as a mode of totemic expression. The iPod its self is just a symbol really, it could be any form of device that has been toted as bringing us closer together as a society, yet drives us apart.

CB: What are your thoughts about artists who are making more traditional aboriginal art and really trying to move those traditional forms and styles forward into the 21st century in relation to artists more like yourself who make contemporary art with aboriginal influences? I was wondering what your thoughts are about how those two approaches communicate with each other and how they might be speaking to different ideas.

SA: I think they’re two conversations that are working parallel to each other. There’s always this notion, this understanding about what Indian art should be. Especially if you’re from the West Coast (Oregon, Washington, BC, Alaska) where they have this idea that Aboriginal art is Northwest Coast Form-line. I guess the question should be about where that understanding comes from, questioning the authority of the anthropologists saying “This is Aboriginal art.” Questioning the authority of the stereotype.

In terms of traditional vs contemporary, I think that it’s supremely important that we keep our traditional culture alive so that it can grow and develop into something even more unique, even more interesting to challenge ourselves to go past what is perceived upon us.

In all of this, I don’t want to refer to myself as an “Indian artist”; “Aboriginal artist”; a “First Nations artist” or a “Native American artist.” I just want to be an artist. That’s the conversation that I want to have. I want to be able to push the perceptions of what is Aboriginal/Indian/North American Indian art, I want to blow those perceptions out of the water so that people can appreciate the work that I’m doing and also have a better understanding for the traditional work that other people make. I think it’s great that these two conversations run in parallel to each other. I realize that, every once, in a while these two conversations are going to butt heads, and I say that from personal experience. But I feel that butting heads in supremely important in that dialogue to help us develop our culture.

CB: In looking at the iPotlatch series and the iDrum series and not coming from a background that is aboriginal, when I look at those works I understand that there is something there but I don’t have the history behind it; I had to do outside research to learn about what a potlatch is and I was wondering how you take that into consideration when you make your work and when you show your work in galleries that maybe your audience is not coming to it with that history or that education about aboriginal issues.

SA: I think it’s important, I think that it’s fresh, I think that someone who might not know the traditional roots of my work or might not know what a potlatch is will be challenged to go and learn about it. I feel my work has the power to educate from within the stylistic and conceptual developments that I’m posing in the work.

What I like about my work is that If the viewer doesn’t have an understanding of what I’m talking about, they’re going to go out and educate themselves on the issue that I’m bringing to the table. That is where I feel my work is successful, it’s not only aesthetically pleasing, but it challenges the viewer to take it upon themselves to educate themselves because they might not know the true history of the treatment of the First People’s of North America.

Sonny Assu, 1884/1951

One of the most important things that I discovered through conversations about the copper cups (1884/1951) piece, was that a lot of people thought it was a commentary on Starbucks. I guess in away, it was, but more a commentary on branding and recognizable symbols we relate to as a consumer society. At first, the reference to Starbucks was more on the tongue-in-cheek based on the choice of the size of the cups. I found it fairly satisfying when I went to the fabricator and plopped down a grande-cup and asked him to make it in copper. His first response was “you can’t drink from that, you’ll burn your face off”. All I said to him was that it was going to be an art project. “Oh.” He said, as he turned to fill out the paper work.

That piece was a huge work of discovery for me. It really opened up my abilities as an artist to start thinking about my work in a stronger conceptual context. And that self-discovery in the work came about through various conversations I had with the curator for the show, my art dealer, friends/family and the public.

But the most beneficial experience about that piece was its aspect of passive education. Where I was able to allow people to discover the beauty of the objects, yet discover a dark part of Canada’s history. Which also relates to the US’s history and treatment to it’s Native American population.

So it was interesting to talk to people who had never heard of a potlatch. It was interesting to hear people try and explain it as a “potluck.” Yes there is an aspect of sharing and eating food, but the potlatch is so much more than that. And in that challenge to self-educate, people were made aware that it was illegal for my family to practice the Potlatch (also the Sundance) in Canada for 67 years. Which is why there are 67 cups in the discarded pile. It’s not just about my family, it’s about the fact that all First People in Canada couldn’t practice their customs, speak their language, practice their religion or spirituality from 1884 to 1951. The ban lifted 60 years ago. That is recent history. This isn’t a thing of the past, this isn’t something that happened 500 years ago. This is something my grandmother lived through; I can talk to someone with first hand knowledge of cultural genocide. And that is what really blew people’s minds. They either had no idea the Potlatch ban was in effect under Canadian law or they thought it only lasted a handful of years. Nope, nearly seven decades.

The piece was also about how two dramatically different societies disseminate wealth. On one hand, you have the Potlatch Society, where they, traditionally, would save their wealth, hoard their wealth, only to give it all away. Everything, you’re wealth as a person in a Potlatch society was based upon how much you gave away. And the symbol of a Chief’s wealth is his copper shield.

Where, in our contemporary Western Society, our notion of wealth is the complete opposite. We collect our wealth, we save our wealth, we keep our wealth, and we display that wealth in the things we buy. iPods, computer, cars, condos… I boiled down our consumption into its simplest form: The Coffee cup. It doesn’t matter which company it is, mom and pop or corporate chain. We are able to walk into a place like Starbucks and drop $6-7 on a cup of coffee, only to discard that cup when we are done with it.

After a potlatch was done, the chief’s would gather and swap stories of their potlatches, essentially trying to one up each other by bragging about how much they gave away. This is why you’ll see copper’s that have been broken, sometimes pieces are broken off as a way to one up another Chief. One story that I heard that gave rise and relevance to the piece was of a group of chiefs one-upping themselves. Chief #1 turned to the other and congratulated him on his potlatch, but challenged him by saying the potlatch that he had was bigger. So he broke off a piece of his copper and tossed it in the fire. Chief #2, not to be out-done, broke of an equal piece to acknowledge the challenge. But in the background, Chief #3 stepped up and said “The potlatch I gave was bigger than all of yours. I have no need for my material wealth, this is how rich I am.” And he tossed his full copper in the ocean to symbolize how wealthy he felt.

Sonny Assu, iPotlatch: 5,000 Years of Ancestors in Your Pocket

CB: I also want to ask you about your own learning about aboriginal issues; I understand that you went to art school at Emily Carr, how did it influence your learning about art and styles to have aboriginal teachers in relation to non-aboriginal teachers while you were there?

SA: Well when I was attending Emily Carr there wasn’t much of an Aboriginal program at that time. We were talking about it, we were trying to get it going. Other than the aboriginal coordinator, I think there was only one Aboriginal teacher that I was taking classes with at the university; mostly around Art History. Dana Claxton, a video artist who taught contemporary aboriginal art history classes. It was great to learn from her, she’s very powerful in terms of her own work. Even though there wasn’t a full-fledged Aboriginal program at that point, I learned a lot about issues revolving around aboriginal art, culture and life in Canada while I was at Emily Carr. Not only from Dana, but my fellow Abo-classmates and the Aboriginal Program Manager, Brenda Crabtree. It wasn’t just about my learning experience at Emily Carr that shaped my drive and desire to learn about my history, I was able to take what I learnt at university and ask questions in the real world. I was able to take my learnt knowledge and talk to my Grandmother, and find out how it related to her. It was there I learnt about the potlatch ban and it was with that knowledge that I was able to ask questions about how it affected my family’s history.

In terms of my aesthetic, I’m self-taught in formline and it was my education and experiences at Emily Carr that helped solidify the humor and politics behind my work.

I think it’s important that the school has opened up a continually growing Aboriginal program to help facilitate Aboriginal students. I do occasionally work for Emily Carr and I have filled in the role of the Aboriginal Program Manager from time to time and I also work as an Alumni Ambassador. I basically get to go around and tell potential Emily Carr students about my career and how Emily Carr can help them achieve their goals. I also think it’s important to give lectures on my work.

In terms of learning from Non-aboriginal instructors, I think it was an important step in shaping my ability as an artist and my politics behind my work. As I’ve said before, I don’t want to be mitigated to being an “Aboriginal Artist” I’m an aboriginal person who makes art. Learning from a breadth of diverse instructors helped me formulate the direction I have taken my work.

CB: Is lecturing about your work and working with students a big part of your practice now as an artist?

SA: Yeah, it actually has been. I usually give around 4-5 presentations on my work every year. I have been for the last few years anyway. If there’s an exhibit that I’m a part of, I always try and take the opportunity to reach out to curators or to the institutions and ask if there’s a possibility to speak about my work. I like to share my ideas, I like to educate and I like the feed back of inspiration I get from people I speak to. It makes my life as an artist that much more fulfilling.

And I do like to speak with Aboriginal people who are going or want to go to post secondary. It feels great to give them inspiration to achieve their goals. Like I was saying earlier, I find it extremely important to be referred as an artist as opposed to a First Nations artist, or an Aboriginal artist because I think my work is more encompassing than just those specific issues. People pick up on that and challenge themselves.

CB: I want to ask you about the use of those terms; using the word “Indian” to “First Nation” to “Aboriginal”; when I was reading your website and thinking about how to pose these questions to you I used the word aboriginal because I kept seeing it on your website. I understand not wanting to be called an aboriginal artist or a First Nation artist or an Indian artist as opposed to just an artist, but what do you think the value of those terms are and why are they continuing to shift and how does that affect the way that you talk about your art?

SA: It’s politics, it’s political correctness.

When I’ve given lectures about my work in the United States, I know the terminology for Aboriginal people down there is Native American. But we’re, hopefully, starting to see a shift in the perception of how to address Aboriginal people.

Aboriginal is the latest politically correct catchphrase In Canada. Five years ago it was First Nations. Five years before that it was Native. But I don’t sit around with grandmother and say “We’re aboriginal People”, we still refer to ourselves as Indian or as we are doing more and more: Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw.

Sometimes when I say that word [Indian] I can see people grimace a little bit, like I’ve said something wrong, because they understand that that’s not the correct term. And it isn’t. It’s disrespectful, but its still part of our everyday lives. If you really want to get correct about it, if you know the specific nation that that person is from you refer to them in that way. I’m Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, I have friends who are Cree; Salish; Haida; Blackfoot; Sto:lo; Anishinabe… Canada has 100s of language dialects on the West Coast alone. There are so many pockets of culture that it’s hard to remember which one everyone comes from. So we blanket people into groups because it’s easier for us.

In utilizing the term “aboriginal” on my website, I think it’s a way for me to allow people to connect to the work I am making through their own interpretations of who is an Aboriginal person or what is Aboriginal art. When they see the term Aboriginal, they’ll assume what my work is, but when they dive deeper into my work, they’ll discover I am much more. It’s also about personal politics, it’s about the affirmation that I am an Aboriginal person. It’s about breaking the perception that all aboriginal people have long black hair, dark skin and eyes. Let’s face it, I’m white, and I am that way because of colonization. I use to refer to myself as the whitest Indian you’ll ever meet. But I’m not, that was me being cheeky, that was me being humorous to draw people in, to give them a sense of comfort in dealing with the issues of colonization. I’ve met a whole bunch of fair skinned aboriginal people over my years as a professional artist… I’m not the only one in my family either.

Sonny Assu, The Breakfast Series

CB: Could you tell me more about that term “Urban Indian”?

SA: It’s just a class structure that the Canadian government has used to classify any aboriginal person living in Canada outside of their home territory, specifically living in cities. I am classed as an urban Indian because I live in a major urban centre. It’s also terminology I use to talk about my work in a contemporary context and I use it as a vehicle to classify the culture I am creating.

CB: I didn’t realize that was a government classification, that’s really interesting. I wanted to ask you about humor, and this idea of sugarcoating politics to make them easier to swallow and placing rants between more humorous pieces and I was wondering if that is possibly a strategy that you learned from watching television and growing up with so much pop culture? Or any way that you’d like to talk about the way that you use humor.

SA: That’s a good observation, I like that. I never thought about that before in terms of the tv aspect, having this kind of sugarcoated cartoony thing or some kind of light and fluffy programming and then all of the sudden there’s a political ad.

CB: I was thinking too about shows like sketch comedy or sitcoms that sometimes will deal with really intense political situations by making fun of them; I’m not sure if you guys have Saturday Night Live but that’s what I was thinking about when I was looking at your work.

SA: I can see how you can draw those conclusions. We don’t have our own Saturday Night Live, we watch it “live from New York”.

Canada’s sense of humor is different than humor that’s coming out of the United States. We do have our own political/satirical humor shows, think Cobert instead of SNL. I think that a lot of our humor is tied more tightly with humor from the UK, it’s more tongue in cheek, more satirical and it can be very biting.

I use humor a lot in my work because it draws people in, and I think you’re right where you take a situation comedy or even something like Saturday Night Live where they’re using the humor to draw you into that issue. I think it’s supremely important because I don’t want to implore or imply an “angry Indian” rant. I don’t want to be slapping people in the face by saying “My land was stolen. My culture destroyed” and generally just being ticked-off. It’s not who I am. I know where that anger comes from and I can talk about it, I can defend it, but it’s not mine to use completely.

I want to be able to bring people into the issues with the humor and that is where I was coming from with the Breakfast Series. I wanted to have people be brought in to the humorous aspects of “Salmon Loops”, “Lucky Beads”, “Salmon Crisp”, “Bannock Pops” and “Treaty Flakes.” They all have elements humor to them. But there’s also political conversation behind all five cereal boxes.

I always see it as the gambit of how we view ourselves as Aboriginal people, how we are perceived as the First People and how we are trying to break away from being Indians. I see it as a way to gently lure people in and lovingly slapping them awake to the issues they’d rather just ignore. It’s really all about dispelling the myth of Canada/America as Utopia.

Treaty Flakes, I see as the most political heavy piece of the five. In British Columbia, we are still dealing with the treaty issues. British Columbia, through its union with Canada, only signed a handful of treaties with Aboriginal people before or around the time of confederation. Not that it really made a difference when Canada continued to break treaties anyhow.

The piece was a way to bring out the frustrations in the Treaty process to a broader audience. The process continually stalls with every change of Provincial or Federal government. And we are looking at a system now, where the only people who will benefit from these treaties, if signed, are lawyers. Every nation currently signed into the treaty process is looking at massive crippling debt that will erode any benefit to signing them.

I feel if I present these politics in such a way that I’m bringing elements of humor to them, you’re going to be more willing to understand the issues that I’m trying to convey. It’s like there is almost an element of psychology to the piece as well.

That’s pretty much where I was coming from, that’s how I use humor in my work. I want to be able to make people laugh and to understand where I’m coming from. If I can make you laugh, and if I can make you smile, when I tell you the stuff that I should be angry about, in a calming manner, you’re going to be more receptive of that. You’re going to get it “oh, okay, I understand where Sonny’s coming from. I understand that his culture was decimated. I understand that his grandmother and grandfather both went to an Indian day school, and that his great-grandmother went to a residential school. I understand they were stripped of their culture, and they weren’t treated humanely. I understand now why Aboriginal people have the right to be angry.” I use humor to bring all of that stuff together, to hopefully help people understand. I want to use humor to draw you in so you can know the anger, so you can understand it and acknowledge it.

CB: Yeah that makes a lot of sense to me. I wanted to ask you next how you navigate being a professional artist, especially one whose work touches on all of these issues, and if you ever feel like aboriginal art forms, both traditional and the more contemporary, are ever recontextualized in the contemporary art world?

SA: I think for me I’m taking a cue from Bill Reid. It was pretty much one of his underlying mandates for his work that he wanted it to be seen along side of master artists of the western world. He didn’t want his work to be relegated to a craft from a perceived to be dying culture. He wanted to highlight the strengths of his culture. He has changed the way people view Aboriginal art and I’m taking that a step further deeper into the realms of contemporary art world.

CB: For you, what are the benefits or the problems with showing this kind of work in a gallery or museum system?

SA: I think it’s really important that my work is viewed in both the gallery and museum context. Whether it’s a commercial art gallery, a contemporary art museum/gallery, an artist run center, an Indian/Aboriginal/Native American/First Nations art gallery, whatever it may be, I think its important to flow in and out of all of those dialogues because it gives people an understanding of where our work can be and how it can be viewed.

CB: How do you navigate being an artist whose work comments on consumerism while producing commodities?

SA: I was reading that question right before you called and I think it’s a good one. It’s interesting, and I think as an artist I think there is this utopian vision that you have to be poor. I don’t want to be poor. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Vancouver is a ridiculously expensive place to be living in. That being said, we all have to make a living. I’m not going to relegate myself to being a Sunday painter or working a nine to five and then getting back to the studio and trying to paint for a few hours. I’m in the fortunate position right now to be able to afford a luxury to live off my passion. This isn’t work for me, work is some place you go to. Work is something that drains you.

Commodity is a label, I create works that people want and it inspires me to challenge myself. I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to support myself off my passion for as long as I have. I think it’s important, as an artist, that I make work that sells. It not only supports me, but it challenges me to be experimental. It has given me the ability to produce a diverse body of work.

I also think its extremely important to keep track of where you are as an artist or what you’re doing as an artist and make sure that you take it upon yourself to stay true to your own vision of what your work should be and not to sell out or just make the work that people want or that people assume you’re going to make. That’s where it crosses the line of strict commodity and I don’t want to be there. I want to continually challenge myself to make interesting objects for people to appreciate whether it’s conceptually or as a commodity.

CB: Could you tell us about what you are working on next?

SA: I have a number of different projects right now.

I’m working on a new series of painted panels that stems from the Longhouse series. I haven’t titled the series yet but it’s going to be a series of work that’s based on the Chilkat blanket, which is a ceremonial robe, predominantly found in The Haida, Tlinglit and Tsimshian cultures. Those cultural groups are farther north than where my people come from. The essence of the new body of painting will deal with how we use social media and objects from consumer culture as forms of status. I finished one last night that has been titled “Status Update” and I’m working on another one called “Hashtag.” Like the longhouse series, they will deal with the creation of new culture and deal with the loss of traditional language while theorizing the creation of a pictorial/character based language by posing the question “what if we hadn’t been colonized?”

I’m working on two new sculptural installations one is of 67 stacked drums called Silenced. The first incarnation of the series can be seen on my site under the drum series. The stacking of the drums, and the iconography painted on them reference the giving away of Hudson’s Blankets at a potlatch. The HBC blankets were also used to spread small pox and tuberculosis amongst the First People to aid in the act of genocide western society would rather forget. It’s another reference to the potlatch ban as well with the stacking of the 67 drums and how they were rendered silenced for nearly seven decades.

The other installation I’m working on is tentatively called faceless where I’m going to be taking the wood scraps of the log home industry, pieces of wood look like Northwest Coast masks, that would have been tossed away. It’s a found-object installation that will question the authority of the anthropology institution by challenging them to collect the remnants of our consumer culture.

On top of my busy production schedule, and getting ready for three exhibits within the next six months, I’m also set to move to Montreal for a couple of years. It’s going to be interesting to see how that side of the country will view my work. I was always worried that my aesthetic was so centric to the west coat that it might not translate well. Although I’ve had successful exhibits in Ontario, so mainly I was also curious to see how the Francophone community would view my work. I had a taste of it this summer and the response was positive and interesting.

CB: I think that those concerns about working in another part of Canada is going to be really interesting, and I’m excited to see how it plays out in these future series.

SA: Yeah, I’m really excited about it too. It’s going to be really interesting to see how my work plays out over there and how I’m going to draw in those different influences. I’m just really excited about being in a city that has a different mindset than Vancouver. Quebec has great support for the arts, which I’m super excited about. Don’t get me wrong, there’s support for the arts in Vancouver as well, but that support comes from the arts community, not the province.

CB: Well thanks a lot for talking with me today.

SA: You’re welcome.

You can learn more about Sonny Assu at his website, http://sonnyassu.com

Tanis Maria S'eiltin - Tlingit

wredstarresearchcenter — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:33:00 -0400

Interviewed by Caitlin Donald

Spring 2010

Tanis S’eiltin’s work emphasizes traditional Tlingit technique and material in which she utilizes to deliver uniquely contemporary and political forms. Her work begs for exploration through intricate, vivacious, and provocative design. It has been my privilege to interview Tanis about her work and artistic processes, her identity, and about creating art that matters.

Caitlin Donald: I am very curious about your If I Only Had a Seaworthy Vessel installation. I understand this was in collaboration with Nata Lukas involving the concept of journey. Can you talk further about the inspiration for the elements within this installation? What was this journey for you?

Tanis S’Eiltin: The primary inspiration for this collaborative installation was the opportunity to work with Nata Lukas who initially secured the gallery space. Together we decided to include natural elements we collected and were continuing to collect from local beaches. Our timeframe for creating the installation was brief and we had already begun our usual migration to visit the spring tides. Nata’s collection of large drift-roots, which he had previously collected over a period of a couple of years, served as the impetus for the installation that would suggest as the viewer moved through it, a journey through an underwater world.

If I Only Had a Seaworthy Vessel

“Journey” for me came to signify an ancestral connection to the waterways of the Pacific Northwest, and the desire to travel on those waters north to my childhood home in Alaska. Contemplating this meaning of “journey” contributed to the realization that the longer I live away from home the more difficult it is to return; physically, intellectually and culturally. Therefore, creating a ship out of stone was alarmingly appropriate. I collected, with the help of family members, hundreds of small flat beach stones of different colors. Together we glued the red, gray and slate green stones onto the gallery wall in a pattern that resembled a wood fishing vessel grounded on shore.

If I Only Had a Seaworthy Vessel

CD: In the Homer Tribune regarding your ‘Hit’ installation, you speak about art as a form of resistance, and how you utilized that within this piece by drawing parallels between what happened in Angoon and the Iraq War. Do you find that resistance plays a large role in your other pieces and installations?

Hit

TS: Yes, although I do not consider myself an activist I find what inspires the creative process is the ability to visually re-create stories or histories of marginalized peoples. Courage to create and exhibit “art of resistance” comes from an appreciation of “traditional” (pre-contact and contact) Tlingit art that was/is aesthetically stunning and politically potent. The goal is to create art that informs and hopefully encourages the viewer to question systems that control the construction one-dimensional myths and truths.

The first major installation that was created with the goal to inform was blatantly titled, Resisting Acts of Distillation, ANCSA 1971. It referenced the impact of the Alaska land claims settlement act on a Nation’s struggle to understand their evolving political and cultural identity.

Resisting Acts of Distillation

I continue to create a variety of works that are charged with contentious subjects. However, I think it is also necessary to just create beautiful objects as well - that are not intended to inform the viewer – for it is this work that also feeds the creative muse and contributes to ideas that re-appear in future works of art that may be political in nature.

CD: You are quoted to have said that the art world has never accepted Native fine art. Why do you think this is? What are the assumptions and expectations of Native art that cause this lack of acceptance?

TS: Reflecting on the quote above, I am not sure I would use the term “never” with regard to the mainstream art world’s acceptance or lack thereof of Native fine art. There are non-natives who work hard to better understand contemporary Native American artists and their work. However, it seems that there still exists a great misunderstanding of the political, social and cultural context of most Native American art. This is due primarily to inappropriate presentations of Native Art for the last 500 + years by Western institutions and the continued lack of multicultural education in today’s academia. (Although responding to this questionnaire has provided a glimmer of hope!). Influential non-native (and in some cases, Native) curators and critics continually misrepresent the stories and aesthetics within works of art or disregard contemporary Native art altogether and admittedly state a lack of knowledge with regard to art that is community based. (The more I grapple with your questions the more I feel I am “painting myself into a corner”). It is impossible to define art let alone Native American Art! As I write I continue to question the use of terms such as fine art, high art and Native art and their ability to encompass a true sense of art made by contemporary indigenous artists both living in and outside of their Native communities.

So you ask, “What are the assumptions … of Native art that causes this lack of acceptance?” I can respond as a Tlingit woman artist – it is assumed, in many cases, that I will create work that is easily identifiable as “Pacific Northwest Coast art,” “Pacific Northwest Coast Women’s Art” or that my art will be aesthetically “primitive” and provide nuances of spiritual energy available for cooptation (I do like to parody this hopefully out dated theory in some of my found-object work). I am really not sure what the people in power in the “High Art World” assume Native art should be – not sure there are entities that are aware of contemporary indigenous artists – I could be wrong!

CD: Your Savage Apparel series really excites me. I find myself wishing that I could physically touch the variety of materials you use within each piece. I look at the skins and hides, the claws, and the knots and I feel this urge to be a part of the sewing and stitching that it took to construct the final products. As you have said, many of the techniques used to create these pieces come from your childhood. Since these are all unfamiliar processes to me but familiar to you, it makes me wonder what you thought and felt as you designed the series. How much of this was a ‘natural process’ for you? How much of this was an experience unique to Savage Apparel?

TS: I find it very inspiring to work in both a calculated, methodical manner as well as in an intuitive manner. If I work on a project that is well planned and carefully executed I like to balance it with another project that is playfully created without regard to aesthetic standards of precision and beauty. Allowing a piece to fail or pushing it to the point of destruction is liberating as these works often inspire the creation of art that is fluid, efficient and not overly contrived or stale. I feel it is important to avoid copying your own work, especially if pieces have been well received and are considered extremely successful. To do so would result in work that is formulaic and predictable. Both of the series of Savage Apparel were created in response to numerous hours of carving small, finely detailed elements in wood and the tedious process of sewing and beading with perfection in mind.

Savage Apparel Series

All the pieces in both of these series were created without preconceived ideas, however with some of the pieces, aesthetic elements and goals were considered as the pieces progressed. In all of the works I was primarily responding to the materials on hand— sealskin, rawhide, beads, feathers, honeycomb paper, bees wax, baleen, claws, light, dried fish skin— all materials I had recently used in other projects. Although each piece was made using similar materials, they are all very unique.

Savage Apparel Series

An outrageously wild piece made of rawhide, rusty nails and a florescent light inspired the creation of the first series of Savage Apparel. Using a wire bait box as a point of departure I wrapped it in a piece of translucent wet rawhide and secured it with rusty nails, a railroad spike and large uneven stitches of coarse black and white nylon thread. I resisted cutting away the dried hair and flesh. As the piece progressed, I wanted to emphasize light and translucency and hoping to enhance this quality in the rawhide I placed a battery-operated light inside the form and to my amazement the hide glowed like ice. As I continued to work on other pieces in the second series I found my goal was to create works of “fine art” that encouraged the viewer to touch or pet the pieces. This response to art is always discouraged in museums and galleries and I thought it would be fun to solicit it. Sensuality and desire became the focus for those pieces lined and covered in beaver fur! My favorite piece is the one covered and lined with beaver fur and adorned with large bear claws. I find it to be a great juxtaposition that both invites touch and avoidance. Once the piece is opened it is almost impossible to keep from petting the interior with its luxurious long, soft, dark brown fur. And when it is closed it invites you to cradle it. It was the most difficult piece to ship off to the Eiteljorg Museum, and the most difficult piece to sell.

Savage Apparel Series: Corporate Baggage

CD: I am interested in the colors represented in Urban Dreams of Dei-Shu. You mention in your artist statement that this piece is in honor of both the women of the village of Dei-Shu and to the importance of the waters that surround your community. Can you describe the relationship between these concepts and the colors used?

TS: Enamored by the large window space approximately 20’h x 10’w x 5’ d, at the Bill Reid Gallery I was inspired to create an elegant work of art that would emphasize and enhance the natural light. The idea to use translucent organza fabric of red, gold, and copper, and a red neon piece was a response to the space as well as the narrative that inspired the creation of Urban Dreams.

Urban Dreams of Dei-Shu

The narrative, the desire to return home, required that I first identify specific symbolism to tell the story. I am not sure the progression of my decisions but an issue that tends to be overlooked is our connection as Indigenous peoples to the waters that have sustained us for centuries. “First peoples of the land” is how we are often defined, but the name Tlingit is telling as its translation in English means “People of the Tide.” Considering the significance of our name I became passionate about emphasizing the connection to the sea and began to design elements that would suggest life within the waters of the Pacific Ocean along the coast of Alaska, Canada and Washington. The waters of the Pacific have provided for Native communities for centuries and have fostered cultures that have similar histories, art, legends, and lifestyles. This is the connection I was referring to in the artist statement.

The decision to use warm colors for all the elements was inspired by an ancient Coho symbol that consists of a circular red form and several salmon. As a member of the Coho clan this symbol is employed to honor the women in my family, and in particular those who fed me stink heads in the smokehouse at Dei-Shu. The story of this symbol is incorporated in the artist statement for Urban Dreams. Copper organza and gold fabric were incorporated to compliment the red neon piece that represents the Coho symbol. However, throughout the construction process I realized that the copper fabric did not amplify the natural and neon light as I had hoped, therefore, I only created one sea form using copper fabric. The color copper has traditional significance as it represents wealth, and in this work can represent the wealth and great abundance of sea life in the Pacific Ocean.

Urban Dreams of Dei-Shu

To create a piece that is aesthetically cohesive I decided to use the colors red, gold and copper. It is a wonderful coincidence, however, that the window screens of Haida designs are blue and green. I am not responsible for this element in the window space as the director of the gallery had ordered the screens and by the time I installed they were adhered to the windows. I appreciated how they made the fabric forms of contrasting colors pop and when natural light moved through the space the blue and green screens provided the illusion of an underwater world.

CD: Do you think of yourself as a “Contemporary North American Indigenous Artist?” Do you think terms like that one are useful or not? Do you feel like there is a separation between contemporary indigenous artists and the rest of the art world as represented by mainstream art magazines, biennials, art fairs, etc.?

TS: I identify as a contemporary Tlingit artist although many do not know what the term “Tlingit” references. So, I may identify as a contemporary Alaska Native artist, but again it is often more applicable to use the term Native American. I hardly use the term Indigenous unless it is in the context of a statement that juxtaposes Western art and artists. As well as being Tlingit I am also a woman, but I prefer not to use this term as it may imply that I am a feminist, and I am not. All of these terms are cumbersome but one thing they have in common is the history of Western colonization. In this sense I often think that I belong to a category of artists who share this history – so you might say that I am a contemporary artist who possesses a colonized worldview. Can you place that in an efficient category or title? How about “Colonized Indigenous Artist?” It is too redundant. When creating art with the acknowledgment of this history and the impact of western colonization, does the work then represent defeat and the perpetuation of concepts that reaffirm victimization?

I find that these titles can be a hindrance or a blessing – depending on the situation. And as soon as I settle on a title it is challenged. In the past I was often confused when indigenous artists wished not to be labeled “Native American” but realized that it is not the rejection of one’s heritage or race but the restrictions that come with this title. Attached to this title is a long and very extensive history of oppression, exploitation and misrepresentation. Once in this box it is difficult to fight your way out. Acknowledging this title often means that your work will have an aesthetic that is easily linked to Native issues and/or styles of the past. If the work does not represent these aspects it is often rejected.

A benefit of carrying the title of “Native American Artist” is that you have many opportunities to exhibit your work alongside other artists who have been labeled “Native American,” which is a very generic term but nonetheless a label that has been institutionalized and is easily recognized by the mainstream. It is recognized, but definitely not understood! A trend that has lasted decades is the practice by curators, museum directors, academics and the like to lump us all into group shows. Although in some instances this endeavor makes a powerful statement, other times there is no statement that makes the exhibition cohesive other than the fact that it is a “Native American” exhibition. This dilutes the potency of individual work. My wish is that institutions and associated Native art advocates honor Native artists with solo exhibitions.

In response to your question concerning exclusion, I do believe that these generic titles do restrict our entrance into the mainstream. Many individual Native American artists have been recognized and are represented in major institutions, but in comparison to mainstream white artists entrance is limited and is often just a token gesture. Once again this relates to the fact that there is not a great deal of knowledge in the mainstream concerning Native American histories, most institutions prefer the romanticized new age Native or the Native of the Indian wars era. Many do not know about our contemporary victories in maintaining our place within contemporary societies. So does this mean that as an artist our responsibility is to educate the public? Where does one start? Will there be a context for understanding an isolated topic or social or political issue?

I must add that these responses reflect my experiences and observations and other Native American artist may have completely different opinions on the issues represented here. It seems that I tend to end my responses with questions – and so next year I may have new opinions and new questions that will be later challenged by other experiences. In the future I might even claim that I am simply an artist of the 21^st Century!

Artist Biography

The creation of Tanis Maria S’eiltin’s art is informed by a rich Tlingit heritage and a philosophy that is in constant flux. She was born into a family of artists; her mother, Maria Miller, was a well-known beader, skin-sewer and a Master weaver of Chilkat Robes. Her uncles carved poles and made silver jewelry. Tanis states that her “formal art training began at home.”

Interested in the opportunity to work with new mediums in academia she enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Resisting the requirement to focus on one medium, Tanis created jewelry, prints and large paper sculptures. However, it wasn’t until she was in graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson that her political voice and unique aesthetic sensibility culminated.

Statements of resistance and hope that reference the impact of Western colonization are evident in her installations, videos, prints, skin drums and a recent series of non-functional handbags titled “Savage Apparel.” Several of her art pieces have been exhibited and collected by major museums throughout the United States and Canada. The exhibition titled, “Ee wdoowata’w ag’e: Did They Rob You?” is one of her proudest contributions to the art world. She co-curated this show that included the work of seven Hawaiians and seven Native American/Native Alaskans. “Did They Rob You?” traveled to Alaska, Washington, New York and New Mexico. She is also a 2005 recipient of the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Tanis’ primary goal as an artist is to make art that matters; “I strive to create art that is concurrently beautiful and informative, that translates provocative messages that raise awareness and encourages dialogue.”

Urban Dreams of Dei-Shu

Artist Statement

The small village of Dei-Shu, with its wood houses lined up shoulder to shoulder along the water’s edge, some with out-stretched legs above the crashing tides, can only be accessed through childhood memories. My earliest recollections are of grandmothers, aunties, mothers and I ambling down the beach to a small rickety smokehouse that sat precariously on rounded rocks. In the smokehouse we would feast on the fine delicacy of fermented salmon heads. Favorite parts of the silvery head were the oily gristle of the nose and the beautiful wing shaped bones of the salmon’s jaw. Sucking bones released the best flavors and the sounds elicited giggles followed by stories with quick punch lines, all shared in the mother tongue. Although I could not speak Tlingit I understood the moment and embraced the closeness.

Today stories of our smokehouse feasts are told in HUD houses located miles from the beach. The only prominent structure surviving in Dei-Shu is a large blue tribal house identifiable by the cedar Raven adorning its exterior. The house resides in isolation along a dusty gravel road that is a main thorough-fair for a neighboring town.

In commemoration of the women of Dei-Shu I have replicated in fabric, beads and neon, the waters that sustain all indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. The red neon at the center of the installation is based on an ancient design that belongs to my great grandmother’s Coho clan. The broken circle, named See.eit, represents the story of Kaaksateen, a woman who insulted the Coho people and as a result was taken to the open waters of the ocean. On their journey they swam through a circular form of razor sharp elements. Several salmon perished and others received lacerations on their tails. It is believed that all Coho must swim through this circular form to return to their place of origin.

Resources:

http://fellowship.eiteljorg.org/#fellows::ArtistProfile?value=62