Artist's Statement
The focus of my most recent artwork rests on Native youth and the expression of their identity within a nation that questions their Indigenity in the context of an increasingly globalized and homogenized society. My paintings and prints use the figure as an accessible entry point into the world of the reservation and the oppressive structures Indigenous people face in the public school system and society at large.
The Eurocentric pedagogy in our schools has estranged Indigenous perspectives from the learning process and from popular culture. I wanted to explore this conflict by integrating motifs that reference the contemporary conflict between Native students’ formation of identity on the reservation and their assimilation of American ideals through the public education system. To this end I have used stars, stripes, lined paper, pages from textbooks, and writing in all of my works to reference the acculturation at work in our schools.
I rely on the figure to bring this struggle to a personal level - to the level of the students who I taught and who continue to experience this denial of their identity on a day-to-day basis. In each work the subject’s expression ranges from the “stoic Indian” popularized in Curtis’ photographs and the subjects of the Taos School of Painting, to the more expressive personae I encountered while living in a rural community. My aim is to interfere with the trope of the romanticized Indian that stains North American art history. To this end I have tried to create a tension between the literal visual language used to describe the figure and the academic symbols superimposed upon it. By communicating a sense that one’s normative reality has been interrupted, my work mimics the forced duality of Native children’s sense of self.
I draw inspiration from the work of contemporary representative painters such as Richard Diebenkorn, as well as other artists who have used race within the context of figure painting as an indirect form of social commentary. Such painters include Kehinde Wiley, Eric Fischl, Robert Colescott, and Erin Currier. While African American, Latino and Muslim subjects remain at the heart of the discussion of race and equality, I find an Indigenous voice proverbially absent from a discussion that has become quintessentially “American.” While I do not share the same ethnic and cultural background as my former students, I seek to humanize rather than fetishize the intimacy of the bond I forged with a particular Native community through my paintings.
The Eurocentric pedagogy in our schools has estranged Indigenous perspectives from the learning process and from popular culture. I wanted to explore this conflict by integrating motifs that reference the contemporary conflict between Native students’ formation of identity on the reservation and their assimilation of American ideals through the public education system. To this end I have used stars, stripes, lined paper, pages from textbooks, and writing in all of my works to reference the acculturation at work in our schools.
I rely on the figure to bring this struggle to a personal level - to the level of the students who I taught and who continue to experience this denial of their identity on a day-to-day basis. In each work the subject’s expression ranges from the “stoic Indian” popularized in Curtis’ photographs and the subjects of the Taos School of Painting, to the more expressive personae I encountered while living in a rural community. My aim is to interfere with the trope of the romanticized Indian that stains North American art history. To this end I have tried to create a tension between the literal visual language used to describe the figure and the academic symbols superimposed upon it. By communicating a sense that one’s normative reality has been interrupted, my work mimics the forced duality of Native children’s sense of self.
I draw inspiration from the work of contemporary representative painters such as Richard Diebenkorn, as well as other artists who have used race within the context of figure painting as an indirect form of social commentary. Such painters include Kehinde Wiley, Eric Fischl, Robert Colescott, and Erin Currier. While African American, Latino and Muslim subjects remain at the heart of the discussion of race and equality, I find an Indigenous voice proverbially absent from a discussion that has become quintessentially “American.” While I do not share the same ethnic and cultural background as my former students, I seek to humanize rather than fetishize the intimacy of the bond I forged with a particular Native community through my paintings.