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

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e B

ayou

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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