cross currents catalog
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November 22, 2013 - February 8, 2014
The innovative artists of Cross Currents add unique voices to the visual language of today. Declarations of individuality, rejecting labels and stereotypes, offer new models of self-
ascribed cultural identification. The works, layered in mean-ing and poetic expression, act as visual representations of
indigenous cultures - growing, changing and surviving.
Cannupahanska • Nicholas Galanin Frank Buffalo Hyde • Merritt Johnson
Sarah Ortegon • Wendy Red Star Sarah Sense • Marie Watt • Will Wilson
Introduction
4
of self-ascribed cultural identification. Both direct and subtle these works encourage a dynamic exchange of thinking. Nicholas Galanin writes in his artist statement, “My art enters this stream at many different points, looking backwards, looking forwards, generating its own sound and motion.”
Intersecting briefly at the Center for Visual Art, Cross Currents illustrates the strength of convergence.
I have a deep appreciation for the artists in this exhibi-tion for sharing their vision. My gratitude to Will Wilson is endless for his honest conversations and erudite writ-ing in this catalogue. Many thanks to the exhibition spon-sors, internal to Metropolitan State University of Denver and external, that have collectively supported the Center for Visual Art in presenting bold exhibitions. Finally, thank you to my colleagues at the Center for Visual Art and MSU Denver for their creativity and encouragement.
A current is constantly moving, shifting, and changing as it picks up contents from its surroundings. It is influenced by obstacles, while also shaping that which it encounters. A current has a past, the catalyst for its origin; a fleet-ing present; and a future that is shaped by all that came before. When multiple currents intersect, an exchange occurs and the waters are changed.
The Cross Currents exhibition brings together the work of nine innovative artists. Although none of the artists share a tribal affiliation, they all reference an indigenous heri-tage, which factors into the content of their artwork. By utilizing mystery, metaphor and wit, the visual exchange is complex and gives form to brilliant, new expressions in the essential progression of contemporary art.
Adding unique voices to the visual language of today, these artists present new possibilities for understanding the experience of indigeneity in contemporary life. They reject labels and stereotypes and offer new models
Creative Director, Center for Visual Art
- Cecily Cullen
5
Speaking to the importance of the expressive arts for his-
torically subjugated peoples, author and cultural critic, bell
hooks, has noted how we, “...work to connect art with lived
practices of struggle. Constituting a genealogy of subju-
gated knowledges, [we] provide a cultural location for the
construction of alternative readings of history told from the
standpoint of the oppressed, the disinherited, or those who
are open to seeing the world from this perspective. Concur-
rently, [we] enable the articulation of cultural practices that
are part of the reality of marginalized groups, not forged
in the context of struggle. The assertion of a decolonized
subjectivity allows us to emphasize resistance, as well as
other aspects of our experience.”¹ This observation is a good place to start when consider-
ing the artwork in Cross Currents, and it is particularly
poignant for understanding the issue of cultural misappro-
priation as it pertains to contemporary Native American
art practice in the 21st Century. As hooks writes, part of
our project is encoding material with stories drawn from
alternative readings of history that often emphasize resis-
tance, but also, are simply about who we are. This process
is at once remarkably complicated and sublimely simple
and almost always mediated by our struggle and play with
cultural mis/appropriation.
Contemporary Native American art is intelligible at one
level as dialogic responses to the racism of the dominant
culture, but at another level involves acts of appropria-
tion from that same dominant culture through which
syncretic forms of indigenized culture have evolved. In a
process that author and scholar Gerald Vizenor has dubbed
“survivance” these syncretic practices manifest themselves
through an incredibly diverse array of cultural practice as
they reassert our continued resistance and presence. One
way to think about this range is to consider that today there
are 566 federally recognized indigenous American nations
each with its own language, economy, customary practice
and state relationship to the United States of America. As
cultural theorist, Kobena Mercer, has pointed out, “these
modern relations of inter-culturation then expand and are
made use of by other cultural groups and then, in turn, are
all incorporated into mainstream mass culture as commod-
ities for consumption. Any account of [Native American]
cultural appropriation and production must take this field
of relationships into account.” 2
From the characterization of our ceremonial garb within
the fashion industry to the overtly racist “red Sambos” of
professional sports teams that claim to honor Native Ameri-
cans as mascots, cultural misappropriation constantly
reminds us of our neo-colonial relationship to this settler
state. Another way to think about cultural misappropria-
tion is as the latest installment in a continued program of
cultural eradication beginning with the ideology of “Kill
the Indian, Save the man,” passing forward to assimilation,
acculturation, termination and relocation, and now integra-
tion vis-à-vis the gains and pitfalls of multiculturalism. For
an ongoing, critical, and dynamic discussion of these issues
please check out the important work of three colleagues,
W o r k i n g i n t h e f i e l d s o f c u l t u r a l s i g n i f i c a t i o n ,
c u l t u r a l m i s a p p r o p r i a t i o n a s c o m p o s t f o r
t r a n s - c u s t o m a r y I n d i g e n o u s a r t p r a c t i c e .
6
Dr. Adrienne Keene, Ed.D, Dr. Jessica Metcalfe, Ph.D. and Dr.
Lara Evans, Ph.D., Native Appropriations (nativeappropriations.
com), Beyond Buckskins (beyondbuckskin.com)and Not Arto-
matic (notartomatic.wordpress.com), respectively, who have
in many ways taken up the mantle of artist/activists like Suzan
Shown Harjo, Charlene Teters, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
So we persist and thrive asserting agency as makers and en-
gaging in this “field of relationships” as we work as trans-cus-
tomary indigenous artists and citizens of our respective nations.
Nicholas Galanin’s, Things Are Looking Native, Native’s Look-
ing Whiter, 2012, for example, deftly plays with these fields
of relationships in both subtle and explicit ways. Galanin’s
mash-up of Curtis Hopi maiden/Lucas Princess Leia is not
only an insight into American popular culture’s fascination
with Indigenous hairstyles but a fascinating portal into the
hidden subtext of colonial representations of subaltern insur-
gence. Princess Leia after all was secretly an insurgent mem-
ber of the Imperial Senate and spy for the Rebel Alliance. The
work is also prescient considering the recent translation of
Lucas’ classic 1977 film into Navajo, a project of the Navajo
Nation Museum designed to promote language survivance.
Engaging performance and installation art, Merritt Johnson,
works between what Diana Taylor has identified as, “the
archive and the repertoire.”3
In exploring this historic and cultural tension between the
written archive and the performative repertoire of oral tradi-
tions, Johnson exposes the relationship between writing,
performance and historical memory on our continent.
Through a process of masking and revelation, Johnson’s
challenging work, “processes marginalization, fear of cul-
ture, difference, and the unknown.”4
The work of Frank Buffalo Hyde on the other hand moves
between overt critique of Native American cultural misap-
propriation to more subtle commentary on the ways in
which Native Americans have been portrayed in American
popular culture. As Jessica R. Metcalfe points out, “ Hyde
demonstrates the role that commercialism plays in building
fallacies about Native lifeways and culture. Throughout his
work he layers text, bold color shapes, visible brush strokes
and paradoxical references to dismantle stereotypes of
Indian art and the American Indian experience.” 5
Other artists in Cross Currents resist cultural misappro-
priation by creating work that defies easy categorization
as Native American art. Works by Marie Watt, Sarah
Sense and Cannupahanska Luger, are as much about how
engaging material can alter what Sherry Farell Racette
¹ bell hooks, “Narratives of Struggle,” in Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imagi-native Writing, ed. Philomena Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 59.
2Kobena Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics,” in Out There: Marginalization and
Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York and Cambridge: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990), 257-8.
3Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in
the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003)
4 Merritt Johnson, Artist Statement, 2013
5 Jessica R. Metcalfe, “Frank Buffalo Hyde,” in Manifestations: New Native Art
Criticism. p.110
7
has identified as “encoded knowledges,”6 as they are about
the politics of representation. As Marie Watt notes about
her Blanket Stories: Samplers series, “We are received in
blankets, and we leave in blankets. The work in these rooms
is inspired by the stories of those beginnings and endings,
and the life in between. I am interested in human stories
and rituals implicit in everyday objects.” 7 Watt’s majestic
reworking of such primary material is a strategy shared
by Sense and Luger who rework photography and ceramic
forms respectively. In a remarkable tale, Sense explains
how her Weaving Waters project took her on a global
journey in order to work the customary weaving material
of her Chitimacha forbearers back into the patterns of her
evocatively woven photographs. She notes, “in northern
Thailand I was weaving a basket with bamboo, and realized
that for the first time I was making a Chitimacha basket with
the same source material from my Native family in another
continent.”8 As Jolene Rickard has written, “Sense continues
to integrate landscape, the dominant genre of photography,
into her work, except her version is a transcultural fusion
of Chitimacha spatial ordering, Western science, and Hol-
lywood hegemony.”9 Similarly, Luger employs a mastery
of form and material to draw out knowledge embedded in
practice and myth. Luger’s expertise with clay is combined
with an uncanny ability to integrate recycled materials such
as yarns, knitted matter, craft foam and felt into his works.
Luger’s work is sensually powerful in the way it gives per-
sonality, spirit and agency to static form. When combined
with the comfortably domestic associations of his recycled
materials, Luger’s sculptures gain an uncanny presence that
both seduces and startles. What does a beautifully colorful
cornucopia of viscera emerging from the thift-store afgan
body of a ten-point buck entitled, (No)stalgia, 2013, reveal
about Native America today? An answer may be found in
Luger’s extended title for the work: “(No)stalgia, multi-media,
(no)stalgia noun: from Greek, nostros, return home and algos,
pain: A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return
to some past period or irrevocable condition. The past is a
construct of the mind and yet we pull from this place an idea
of who we are. I will not tell you who I was, I will tell you
who I am now.”10 Photography is used by many of the artists in this exhibition as
primary material, often reconfigured through customary prac-
tice or juxtaposition to facilitate the telling of powerful multi-
media stories. Will Wilson’s work however, takes on the process
and exchange of a photographic portrait sitting as his artistic
raw material. In his Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange
(CIPX), Wilson strives to indigenize the photographic exchange
by emphasizing the relational aesthetics inherent in the process.
Using the historic Wet Plate Collodion process Wilson invites sit-
ters to collaborate in the creation of their own portrait. Wilson
then gifts the sitter the resulting “tintype” in exchange for a non-
exclusive right to use a high resolution of the image in his grow-
ing body of portraiture. As Wilson explains, “Ultimately, I want
to ensure that the subjects of my photographs are participating
in the re-inscription of their customs and values in a way that
will lead to a more equal distribution of power and influence
8
in the cultural conversation. It is my hope that these Native
American photographs will represent an intervention within
the contentious and competing visual languages that form
today’s photographic canon.” 11
Cross Currents artists also explore trans-customary tech-
nique and practice in order to organize and create works
that make reference to indigenous technologies while
engaging the beauty and difficulty of present day Indian
circumstance. Sarah Ortegon’s work operates at the inter-
stices of customary practice--in the form of complex stitch
beadwork, substance abuse awareness and prevention,
and the recuperative power of art to transform reality.
Her, On the Mend, 2013, uses artistic practice to imagine
and implement a reversal of the loss of, “Once meaning-
ful practices...being replaced by the use of mind numbing
substances, which is off-setting the balance of the commu-
nities on the reservation.”12 Beadwork is a labor-intensive
practice, which requires a commitment that can lead to
focused contemplation and healing. Through the process
of beading her found “shooter” bottles of alcohol, Ortegon
is capturing them as her own, displacing the damage they
have done and opening a space for recuperation. Wendy
Red Star’s star quilts combine real Crow “rez” colors and
patterns with photographic images sourced from her
father’s extensive personal archive. In mining her father’s
Ektachrome museum of 1970s Crow life and embedding
the images into customary forms Red Star is, “mediating
our experience of Crow people in the twenty-first century
by honoring her home with a healthy sense of humor,” and
in so doing, “She checks our expectations to explain the
equivalences of life then and now.” 13 Red Star’s vibrant
work makes the case that traditional art forms have al-
ways been about innovation. Her photographic star quilts
represent contemporary, trans-customary, cultural produc-
tion created from an affirmative position of survivance by
a contemporary Crow woman.
Within the competing logics of artistic inspiration and
the politics of representation this is one framework from
which the artists exhibiting in Cross Currents create
counter-narratives that engage, challenge and play within
a field of cultural signifiers of Native America.
- Will Wilson, Santa Fe, 2013
6 Sherry Farrell Racette, “Encoded Knowledge: Memory and Objects in Con-temporary Native American Art,” in Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, ed. Nancy M. Mithlo (Santa Fe: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011), 40
7 Marie Watt, “Artist Statement,” http://mkwatt.com/index.php/content/work_detail/category/blanket_stories_samplers/
8 Sarah Sense, “Weaving Water project statement,” 2013.
9 Jolene Rickard, “Skin Seven Spans Thick,” in Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor, ed. Kathleen Ash-Milby (Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian), 94.
10 Cannupahanska Luger, “extended title,” http://cannupahanska.com/art.
php?projects=archive
11 Will Wilson, “Artist Statement, CIPX,” http://willwilson.photoshelter.
com/#!/about
12 Sarah Ortegon, Artist statement, 2013.
13 Polly Nordstrand, “Beauty and the Blow-up Beast,” in Art Quantum: the
Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 2009, eds. James H. Nottage with Jennifer Complo McNutt and Ashley Holland, (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 92.
9
I make my work by beginning and working until I don’t have to think about what I am doing anymore. I get started on a piece and hopefully the form and I can meet some-where in the middle. It’s a give and take and sometimes it comes right to me, and some-times I have to really reach for what I am trying to achieve from a piece of work. My work is made out of everything I have done in my entire life up until this moment, and clay. Every piece has taken me my whole life to create, and I put all of me into each work I create, and there is still much more to come.
CANNUPAHANSKA
My art is a moment in my life. It is a snapshot of an amazing moment I have experienced. I can sit down and look at the work I have made and see them as the bi-products of my life experiences. My work is what is left after all of the really wonderful art, the whole process of creating the art, has happened. Once a piece is completed I no longer feel like it is mine, it has become a representation of a moment that I really enjoyed. I don’t get attached to the object itself after it’s completed, and I look forward to someone else enjoying all that I have put into and gotten out of the work and the process of creating it.
Underneath It All, 2012
10
“
Born in North Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation in a small town known as Fort Yates Cannupa Hanska Luger comes from a place of “...not knowing...”. His mother, Kathy “Elk Woman” Whitman, is faith, his father, Robert “Bruz” Luger, is hard work, and he remains the middle distance. His genetics are de-rived from Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, Norwegian and trace elements of suns and moons and dust. Cannupa Hanska spent his summers on his father’s ranch in North Dakota and learned the benefit of labor. His mother raised him and his siblings on art, it provided food, clothing, and shelter, and so self-expression was in a way mother’s milk. As an artist’s child he understands the ebb and flow of the life that artists choose and he too feels compelled to do the same. Now is the time to love and to fail and to learn and to decay, the uni-verse is, and that is all ...and so it goes.
(NO)tsalgia, 2012 11
NICHOLAS GALANIN
Fam
ilia
r Fa
ces
(det
ail)
, 201
312
Culture cannot be contained as it unfolds. My art
enters this stream at many different points, looking
backwards, looking forwards, generating its own sound
and motion. I am inspired by generations of Tlingit
creativity and contribute to this wealthy conversation
through active curiosity. There is no room in this
exploration for the tired prescriptions of the “Indian
Art World” and its institutions. Through creating I
assert my freedom. Concepts drive my medium. I draw
upon a wide range of indigenous technologies and
global materials when exploring an idea. Adaptation
and resistance, lies and exaggeration, dreams,
memories and poetic views of daily life--these themes
recur in my work, taking form through sound, texture,
and image. Inert objects spring back to life; kitsch is
reclaimed as cultural renewal; dancers merge ritual
and rap. I am most comfortable not knowing what
form my next idea will take, a boundless creative path
of concept based motion.
Born in Sitka, Alaska, Nicholas Galanin has struck an intriguing balance between his origins and the course of
his practice. Having trained extensively in ‘traditional’ as well as ‘contemporary’ approaches to art, he pursues
them both in parallel paths. His stunning bodies of work simultaneously preserve his culture and explore new
perceptual territory. Galanin studied at the London Guildhall University, where he received a Bachelor’s of Fine
Arts with honors in Jewelry Design and Silversmithing and at Massey University in New Zealand earning a Master’s
degree in Indigenous Visual Arts. Valuing his culture as highly as his individuality, Galanin has created an unusual
path for himself. He deftly navigates “the politics of cultural representation”, as he balances both ends of the
aesthetic spectrum. With a fiercely independent spirit, Galanin has found the best of both worlds and has given
them back to his audience in stunning form.
Things are Looking Native, Native is Looking Whiter, 2012
13
FRANK BUFFALO HYDE
Buffalo Fields Forever #3, 2012
In this year already we have seen a African American
president sworn into his second term. In this atmo-
sphere you would think that equality and acceptance
were to be taken for granted. Not so, for the Native
American, it seems there is an open season on cultural
appropriation, from Urban Outfitters to No Doubt these
images do not pay homage to the Indigenous people of
North America. It is Red-Face racism that is effortlessly
marketed to the masses.
At no other time in history have we (Natives) been so
well equipped and educated and willing to fight these
derogatory attacks on our image. So No Doubt removed
their video, Urban Outfitters is still in court. This conflict
of idea versus Ideals can only be won when we own our
own image. So we Are and We do.
Buffalo Fields Forever, 2012
14
Frank Buffalo Hyde, a Southwestern born artist
who traces his heritage to the Nez Perce and
Onondaga people, has been recognized for
breaking through the boundaries that many
place around what they think Native American
art should look like. He is defining himself as
a Native American without being a stereotype
dealing with what he calls the “fragmented
contemporary life” of a Native U.S. citizen.
Hyde grew up in central New York, and then
returned to New Mexico to study at the Santa Fe
Fine Arts Institute and the Institute of American
Indian Arts. He’s been exhibiting his work for
over 15 years -- since he was 18 -- showing in many
Santa Fe galleries as well as in Chicago, New York
and San Francisco. Having established himself
in the competitive Santa Fe art market, he felt
comfortable moving away and keeping up his
career there from a distance.
In-A
ppro
prai
te (
deta
il),
201
315
MERRITT JOHNSON
“
My practice is a cross-disciplinary negotia-
tion of discontinuity. Through my work, I
explore the connections and oppositions
between (and within) bodies and place.
My work with figures treats opulent interi-
ors and identifiable patterns, as the mate-
rial for camouflaging bodies; pointing to
protection, aggression and the difficulty of
cross cultural disguise. Monsters are made
by unknowing. By covering, we make
the unknown. In this making we create
monster-imposters; of ourselves, of others,
willing and unwilling. This work processes
marginalization and fear of culture, of
difference, of the unknown. The real mon-
sters remain hidden. The monsters we see,
covered in drapery, give us direction and
make us dangerous. Trouble comes in slip-
ping into the monster (not the disguise) and
devouring everything to avoid being eaten
by a strange curtain thrown over a _________.
My work with land, slides between the
representation celebrated in romantic
landscapes, and what we cannot, or do
not see- images are redacted or obscured;
objects leak, drip and sag. I treat land,
sky, clouds and everything, like survivors
with agency, bent on continued existence.
The Clouds represent clouds. They are
migrants, outside land-based agreements.
It’s unclear if they’ve been shot out of the
sky by anti-aircraft artillery (for weather
modification), or if they’re hurling them-
selves to the ground to find alternate
routes of travel, or if they are intentionally
targeting things here on the ground. I’m
interested in clouds because they are un-
like us. They are non-human and difficult
to anthropomorphize; seemingly incapable
of benevolence or violence, but they exist
without recognition of laws established by
land-based nations, they are an example.
Diversion Pattern, 2013
16
Merritt Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist
working in painting, sculpture and performance.
Her practice considers physical and material
limitation in relation to mediating experience
and survival. Johnson has performed in various
galleries and public sites such as the U.S./
Canadian border, the wall around the Capitol
Building, the Denver Art Museum and the
Museum of Anthropology at the University of
British Columbia. Her work is included in private
collections as well as the permanent collect of
the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Museum
of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe NM. Her
work has recently been published in Antennae
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and
Salish Seas (Talon Books). Based in East Harlem
NY, of mixed Mohawk, Blackfoot and non-
Indigenous descent, Johnson holds a BFA from
Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from
Massachusetts College of Art.
Waterfall Face (emergency mantle for diplomatic security and near invisibility), 2012
Diversion Pattern, 2013
17
SARAHORTEGON
On the Mend is a body of work employing found objects
paired with traditional Native American materials; leather,
hair, and beads. A beaded large leather pelt surrounded by
suspended miniature liquor bottles highlights reservation
landscapes, all of which are beaded. Collectively these beaded
objects express the healing process that occurs after tragedy.
One of my inspirations includes James Luna’s performance
“Artifact Piece.” He lays still in a display case, reflecting on the
Native American culture that is sometimes viewed as being
extinct. On the Mend takes his thoughts a step further and re-
flects on the current state of existence for the people and rural
areas on the reservation. The central leather pelt portrays a
landscape of an abandoned burnt out house juxtaposed with
found alcohol “shooter” bottles, emptied of their “spirits” like
lost souls. Once meaningful practices are being replaced by
the use of mind numbing substances, which is off setting the
balance of the communities on the reservation.
My work brings attention to the lost, deserted, and ignored,
representing both the people and the objects. The finished
bottles are suspended from hair; which is significant be-
cause when someone passes away in the Arapahoe culture,
they are buried with the hair of their loved ones.
Although, On the Mend concentrates on what was left
behind, beadwork, a meditative process, expresses the slow
progression of healing. Beadwork is time consuming, but in
the end, a beautiful product is made from something that
was once dismissed as trash. Taking the discarded, such as a
scrap of glass and giving it meaning, is another way of giving it
a purpose; allowing the healing process to begin.
Fences, 2013
18
Born in Denver, CO on September 8th, 1986. I am the lucky
number ten, in a family of twelve. My Mom is Sharon Joy
Enos Ortegon, and my Dad is Angel Ortegon, neither of them
holding as much as a high school diploma. Ever since I was
younger, I remember traveling back and forth from Denver,
Colorado to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
One of my first memories was when I was three years old,
watching the dancers during a pow-wow and trying to mimic
their movements. From that time on I felt the drum beat in
my heart, and I knew that I had to express this passion with
the rest of the world through my art. My summers were
spent on the reservation, swimming in the river, at my aunts
playing hide and seek in the dark, riding our bikes, throw-
ing rocks at the dogs that over populated the reservation
who would otherwise, nip at our heels. The rest of the year
consisted of going to school in Denver, Colorado where my
parents bought a house.
All of these experiences are what inspired my art.
Life experiences on the reservation are different then the subur-
ban life style of Denver. In school, I do not recall being any dif-
ferent then any of the Caucasian kids until we had a thanksgiving
reenactment, and I was nominated to be a Native girl. Since then,
I started to see the differences between the two life styles.
I noticed while I was living in the city, buildings were always torn
down, rebuilt, new business introduced every so often. Where as
on the Reservation, the abandoned buildings, broken down cars,
forgotten trailers were left as eyesores on the landscape.
The culture on the reservation is still alive and thriving, how-
ever, the reservation needs to grow positive affirmations for the
people. Individuals can come together to create a stronger com-
munity for future generations, and that is why I decided to share
my thoughts through the use of beads and traditional materials.
Moving beyond the past and creating something to build upon,
just like beadwork, will take time and dedication to finish.
Unpolluted Sky (detail), 2013
Fences, 2013
In the Clouds (detail), 2013 19
WENDY RED STAR
The Maniacs, 201120
Wendy Red Star is an artist living and working in Portland,
Oregon. Red Star received her B.F.A. from Montana State
University-Bozeman and her M.F.A from UCLA in 2006.
She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her
exhibitions include shows at the Fondation Cartier pour
l’Art Contemporain, Hallie Ford Museum, The Eiteljorg
Contemporary Art Fellowship 2009, Utah Museum of
Contemporary Art, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Laura Bartlett
Gallery London, The Museum of Contemporary Native
Arts, Missoula Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, National
Museum of the American Indian-New York, Minneapolis
Institute of Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art,
and the Bockley Gallery. She has been a visiting lecturer at
a range of respected institutions, including the Institute of
American Indian Arts (IAIA), Crow’s Shadow Institute of the
Arts, Banff Centre, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne),
Portland State University, Oregon College of Art & Craft,
Flagler College, Fairhaven College, Fine Artworks Center-
Provincetown, and I.D.E.A. Space-Colorado College.
Over the course of her practice, Red Star has worked within
and between the mediums of photography, sculpture,
installation, performance and design. Red Star’s multilayered
work influences are drawn from her tribal background (Crow),
daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected snapshots
of moments of the past and present, and stories that are both
real and imagined. Through her photographs and sculpture a
new cosmos is built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low,
conveying ideas and feelings through representations created
from suggested associations of seemingly diverse sites, objects
and ideas. HUD houses, rez cars, three legged dogs, powwow
culture, indigenous commoditization, and Red Star’s personal
collection of memories growing up as a half-breed on the Crow
Indian reservation are used to excite a response in a form that
can be experienced by others.
The work represents an insider/outsider view that is rich with
complexity and contradiction. Red Star’s unruly approach
examines the consumptive exposure of a cross section of
American cultures while also being a meditation on her own
identity. Her works explore the intersection between life on the
reservation and the world outside of that environment. Red Star
thinks of herself as a cultural archivist speaking sincerely about
the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society.
The Maniacs (detail), 2011
21
My Basket Story (detail), 2013
SARAH SENSE
Sarah Sense received a BFA from California State
University, Chico (2003), and an MFA from Parsons
The New School for Design, New York (2005). Sense’s
visual art practice is weaving photographs with tra-
ditional Chitimacha basketry techniques. Since 2010,
Sense has been traveling and researching contem-
porary Indigenous arts throughout North, Central,
and South America and Southeast Asia. She recently
published her first book, Weaving the Americas, A
Search for Native Art in the Western Hemisphere, a
project based on a seven month journey from Canada
to Chile. The project garnered her first traveling
solo exhibition, Weaving the Americas, Tejiendo las
Amerícas, premiering at Museo de Arte Contemprá-
neo, Universidad Austral, Valdivia, Chile (2011). Her
most recent project, Weaving Water premieredin
Bristol, UK with Rainmaker Gallery, with curatorial
support from Max Carocci of British Museum (2013).
Other recent exhibitions include: First Continental
Biennial of Contemporary Native Arts, Museo de Na-
cional Culturas Populares, Mexico City (2012), HIDE:
Skin As Material and Metaphor, Smithsonian Institu-
tion, National Museum of the American Indian, New
York (2010); Pieces of Home, Evergreen State College,
Olympia, Washington (2010); Reimagining the West,
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale,
AZ (2010); In/SIGHT, Chelsea Art Museum, New York,
(2010). Collections include the Smithsonian Institu-
tion, National Museum of the American Indian, the
Chitimacha Tribal Museum, Eaton Corporation,
Tweed Museum of Art at University of Minnesota;
and private collections in Australia, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Germany, England, and the United States.
22
Wea
vin
g th
e B
ayou
(de
tail
), 2
013
Bristol – Guadeloupe – Charenton explores slavery in the Caribbean,
connecting the three locations through the little-known history of
Native American slave trade. The installation is a photo and paper
web of wallpaper donning British and French iconography mashed
with maps of Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Europe. The photo-
weaving technique visually explores a research project linking
the French Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe to Bristol, home of
the European slave harbour in the United Kingdom to my Native
American ancestry of Chitimacha and Choctaw.
Weaving photographs is a way of connecting with a familial
tradition that has dissolved into a hand-full of talent. Through
photographic processes, cut paper and physical weaving, I have
taught myself how to carry on the tradition of weaving Chitimacha
patterns, bringing me into a life of meeting and knowing other tra-
ditional artists. Weaving Water was first explored in the Caribbean
Islands, later transitioning to Southeast Asia where the majority of
the series was created.
The two final grid installations that were created for the Weav-
ing Water series were Weaving the Bayou and My Basket Story.
These two installations are woven into the Bristol – Guadeloupe
– Charenton installation reconnecting my personal story of
weaving and the Chitimacha Reservation landscape to the slave trade.
Weaving the Bayou is based on Bayou Teche at the Chiti-
macha Reservation in Charenton, Louisiana. In this piece
there are fifteen different photographs of one sunset over
the Bayou. I photographed these images in November 2008
and wove them together in 2013. Traditional Chitimacha
baskets are made from river cane, an indigenous plant to
Bayou Teche.
My Basket Story is a piece that weaves together a hand-
written story of how I came to my weaving practice
fifteen years ago. The bamboo paper becomes my journal
of experiences since I first engaged with the Chitimacha
baskets as a teenager, until now, where I am on the cusp
of learning how to do the traditional basket weaving. The
piece is a part of the Weaving Water series and includes
photographs from the Caribbean search project of No-
vember 2012 and Southeast Asia of January and February
2013. All of the bamboo paper interwoven into the work is
from northern Thailand, replacing the natural material of
river cane, which is the material for traditional Chitima-
cha baskets. While my story of weaving is woven into
the piece, the text can only be deciphered on two of the
sixteen panels. The lost language is covered and in places
laid over it self and covering my story.
23
MARIE WATT
My work explores human stories and rituals implicit in
everyday objects. I consciously draw from indigenous design
principles, oral traditions, and personal experience to shape
the inner logic of the work I make. My recent work explores
the history of wool blankets. As I fold and stack blankets
they begin to form columns that have references to linen
closets architectural braces, memorials (Trajan); sculpture
(Brancusi for one), the great totem poles of the Northwest
and the conifer trees with which I grew up. These blanket
forms also present themselves in other mediums of my work
such as with printmaking, bronze, and cedar. In the case of
my wood cuts, I appreciate the warm tactile quality of the
material. There is a familiarity and intimacy with wood
that again reminds me of blankets. The material offers
another layer of story that is physically and metaphorically
woven into the work, like with cedar, which is considered
to be a sacred natural resource for indigenous people of the
Northwest or the hope chests in which blankets are stored.
Easy Chair (detail), 2012
24
Marie Watt is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Born in 1967 to the son of Wyoming ranchers and a daughter of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation (Iroquois / Haudenosaunee) Watt identifies herself as “half Cowboy and half Indian.” Formally, her work draws from indigenous design principles, oral tradition, personal experience, and Western art history. Her approach to art-making is shaped by the proto-feminism of Iroquois matrilineal
custom, political work by Native artists in the 60s, a discourse on multiculturalism, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Like Jasper Johns, she interested in “things that the mind already knows.” Unlike the Pop artists, she uses a vocabulary of natural materials (stone, cornhusks, wool, cedar) and forms (blankets, pillows, bridges) that are universal to human experience (though not uniquely American) and noncommercial in character.
Cradle Cobble (Brooklyn), 2012 25
WILL WILSON
Sandra Lamouche (detail), 2012
William (Will) Wilson is a Diné photographer who spent
his formative years living in the Navajo Nation. Born in
San Francisco in 1969, Wilson studied photography at the
University of New Mexico (Dissertation Tracked MFA in
Photography, 2002) and Oberlin College (BA, Studio Art and
Art History, 1993). In 2007, Wilson won the Native American
Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum, and in 2010
was awarded a prestigious grant from the Joan Mitchell
Foundation. Wilson has held visiting professorships at
the Institute of American Indian Arts (1999-2000), Oberlin
College (2000-01), and the University of Arizona (2006-08).
From 2009 to 2011, Wilson managed the National Vision
Project, a Ford Foundation funded initiative at the Museum
of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, and helped to
coordinate the New Mexico Arts Temporary Installations
Made for the Environment (TIME) program on the Navajo
Nation. Wilson is part of the Science and Arts Research
Collaborative (SARC) which brings together artists inter-
ested in using science and technology in their practice with
collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and
Sandia Labs as part of the International Symposium on
Electronic Arts, 2012 (ISEA). Recently, Wilson completed an
exhibition and artist residency at the Denver Art Museum
and is currently the King Fellow artist in residence at the
School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM.
26
As an indigenous artist working in the 21st century, employ-
ing media that range from historical photographic processes
to the randomization and projection of complex visual
systems within virtual environments, I am impatient with
the way that American culture remains enamored of one
particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-
American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades
from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis pro-
duced his magisterial opus The North American Indian. For
many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time
in Curtis photos. Other Native artists have produced photo-
graphic responses to Curtis’s oeuvre, usually using humor as
a catalyst to melt the lacquered romanticism of these stereo-
typical portraits. I seek to do something different. I intend to
resume the documentary mission of Curtis from the stand-
point of a 21st century indigenous, trans-customary, cultural
practitioner. I want to supplant Curtis’s Settler gaze and the
remarkable body of ethnographic material he compiled with a
contemporary vision of Native North America.
I propose to create a body of photographic inquiry that will
stimulate a critical dialogue and reflection around the histori-
cal and contemporary “photographic exchange” as it pertains
to Native Americans. My aim is to convene with and invite
indigenous artists, arts professionals, and tribal governance
to engage in the performative ritual that is the studio portrait.
This experience will be intensified and refined by the use of
large format (8x10) wet plate collodion studio photography.
This beautifully alchemic photographic process dramatically
contributed to our collective understanding of Native American
people and, in so doing, our American identity.
In August of 2012, at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa
Fe, I initiated the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange
(CIPX). This was the initial spark for an ongoing intervention
into the history of photography that I plan to undertake. I aim
to link history, form, and a critical dialogue about Native Ameri-
can representation by engaging participants in dialogue and a
portrait session using the wet plate process. This multi-faceted
engagement will yield a series of “tintypes” (aluminum types)
whose enigmatic, time-traveling aspect demonstrates how an
understanding of our world can be acquired through fabricated
methods. Through collaboration with my sitters I want to indi-
genize the photographic exchange.
I will encourage my collaborators to bring items of significance
to their portrait sessions in order to help illustrate our dialogue.
As a gesture of reciprocity I will give the sitter the tintype pho-
tograph produced during our exchange, with the caveat that I
be granted the right to create and use a high resolution scan of
his or her image for my own artistic purposes.
Ultimately, I want to ensure that the subjects of my photo-
graphs are participating in the re-inscription of their customs
and values in a way that will lead to a more equal distribution
of power and influence in the cultural conversation. It is my
hope that these Native American photographs will represent
an intervention within the contentious and competing visual
languages that form today’s photographic canon. This critical
indigenous photographic exchange will generate new forms
of authority and autonomy. These alone—rather than the old
paradigm of assimilation--can form the basis for a re-imagined
vision of who we are as Native people.
Toward a Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange
27
The Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Center for Visual Art is the off-campus contemporary art
center that leverages bold exhibitions, innovative education programs and
entrepreneurial workforce development programs to provide accessible, diverse,
high-quality art experiences that advance the global urban dialogue
Our Mission
This catalogue accompanied the exhibition Cross Currents, curated by Cecily Cullen, shown from November 11, 2013 - February 8, 2014 at Metropolitan State University of Denver’s off campus art gallery, the Center for Visual Art.
The Center for Visual Art would like to thank our sponsors : Colorado Creative Industries Jan and Fred Mayer FundMSU Denver Office of Institutional Diversity MSU Denver Student Advisory BoardMSU Denver School of Letters, Arts and SciencesSpringHill Suites Denver Downtown at MSU DenverThree Tomatoes CateringU.S Bank
A special thanks to:Bockley Gallery, MinneapolisGreg Kucera Gallery, Seattle
James BussPDX Contemporary Art, Portland
Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe
965 Santa Fe Drive | Denver, Colorado, 80204 | 303.296.5207 | www.msudenver.edu/cva
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