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Michael Cornelius doesn’t consider himself an artist.

An abundant collection of gold and silver medallions earned in First American art markets seems to contradict this sentiment.

A Chickasaw preservationist, Cornelius earned these awards for cultural objects he has created most of his life such as Native flutes, bows, arrows, blow guns, arrow quivers, drums, jewelry, basketry, and various Chickasaw-style weapons and shields.

“The items that other people see as art, it’s just what I do,” Cornelius explained.

In his youth, he developed a keen understanding of his Chickasaw heritage and how cultural items are intertwined with cultural identity, with the help of family members.

His Chickasaw uncle, Byron Maytubby, taught him to craft longbows at the age of 12, and to hunt birds, squirrels and small game.

“We went and cut an ash tree with the ax, and he showed me how to make one. That’s when I started making bows, and I’ve been making them ever since,” said the 69-year-old artist.

Cornelius is constantly in the process of making a longbow or searching the woods for materials for his next project.

His mission for creating traditional Chickasaw art is simple: he wishes to maintain the knowledge of the craft and pass it on to others, just as his uncle did for him.

About 35 years ago, Cornelius began making traditional flutes and developed a connection with Native flutes so strong it has become a part of his identity.

Cornelius has taught dozens of classes on crafting and playing the instrument and performed Native flute concerts across the globe.

“Everybody that sees me says, ‘Oh, you’re the flute guy,’” he said.

In fact, he has crafted so many hand-carved flutes in the past decade he has lost count. Using a wide variety of wood or bamboo cane, Cornelius carves each exclusively by hand, including the two interior chambers.

“There are two different kinds (of flutes), the kind that’s made from bamboo cane, it doesn’t take as long. But the flip side, a hand-carved, I hand carve them inside and out, takes me about 34 hours to make one.”

The results are magnificent, and each flute is one-of-a kind. Cornelius’ flutes have taken the shape of gar fish, complete with detailed scales, a metallic sheen and teeth which resemble tiny needles. Others resemble majestic swans and cranes or are more traditional. His works of art are on

Michael Cornelius display in facilities throughout the Chickasaw Nation.

“When something becomes a passion, I guess it can become a piece of art. I really never figured my flutes were art. I just made them and enjoy them,” Cornelius said.

Once he learned how to craft the flute, he became skilled at playing it and began composing his own music, something very few artists do.

“To play a flute is one thing. To make one is something else, but to find a person that can make and play (one) is a rarity,” he said.

Cornelius has always had an interest in music and earned a music scholarship at Murray State College, Tishomingo, Oklahoma, in the 1970s. About the same time, he started listening to Native flute music. R. Carlos Naki (Navajo, Ute) is one of the first to revive the art and influenced Cornelius.

“It was sort of a Renaissance in the 1960s, but there were only a few flute makers and players around.”

After Cornelius retired from a four-decade career in education, he served the Chickasaw Nation for many years and worked in cultural resources at the Chickasaw Cultural Center. There, he continued his mission to pass on the craft to others.

“When I started at the cultural center, I didn’t know of any Chickasaw flute players. Now there are about seven who took an interest in it,” he said.

A consummate educator, Cornelius explained the historic connection between the flute and the Chickasaw people, who made river cane flutes and ball stick whistles, a form of a river cane flute.

“They would use that to distract opponents during stickball games,” he said.

First American tribes have always used flutes, Cornelius said, pointing to the Anasazi flute, which was discovered in Arizona in 1931 and dated between 620 and 670 AD. The Beltrami flutes, named for an Italian explorer who collected them in the 1820s while exploring the Mississippi River and sent them to Italy, are known as the oldest existing Indigenous flutes.

Although Cornelius retired from the Chickasaw Nation in 2016, his drive to share the culture, as well as preserve the Chickasaw language, has continued.

“I haven’t stopped on my flute journey,” he said.

He launched a First American flutist service and continues to perform at events such as receptions, weddings and concerts.

Take a Bow

– Pass it on

Creating art is engrained in Cornelius. In addition to crafting Native flutes, he continues to create longbows, which are also made exclusively by hand, and can take anywhere from a month to a year to complete.

He selects the wood, typically hickory, bois d’arc, ash or mulberry, and lets the stave cure for two to five years before shaping the bow.

“Being in nature and harvesting is a beautiful thing, too. Taking a piece of raw wood and turning it into something that is pleasing to the eyes is remarkable. To take it from one point to another, it just takes a lot of patience. You have to read the wood. Work with the wood. Troubleshoot the grain. No two are alike. Each one is unique,” he said.

Education

Cornelius said his Chickasaw heritage comes from his mother, Eulita “Lita” Maytubby Cornelius. His maternal grandfather, Silas Maytubby, was an original enrollee.

He grew up in a military family. His father, Thurice Cornelius, served in three branches of the military – Navy, Army and Air Force – and served in three conflicts, including World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

Born in the Philippine Islands, Cornelius grew up in far-flung locations such as Turkey, Arizona and New Mexico before his family returned to the Mill Creek, Oklahoma, area.

After completing high school at Mill Creek, Cornelius attended Murray State College and East Central University, Ada, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He received a master’s degree in behavioral science from Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Durant. He later attended Bemidji State University, Bemidji, Minnesota, and earned a teacher and principal licensure from the University of Juneau, Anchorage, Alaska.

During his career in education, Cornelius served as a teacher, counselor, psychologist, academic adviser, and other roles in Oklahoma, Minnesota and Alaska, at postsecondary, tribal, public and state institutions.

He is a firm believer that education lifts up the individual and is key to modern survival.

“The modern warrior is the one who has education. Historically, we used the bow for survival, and today we use our education for survival,” he said.

Cornelius is participating in the Artesian Arts Festival for the first time in seven years.

He marvels at the progress of the Chickasaw Nation in the last four decades. He served the tribe beginning in 1976 as an intern for the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) program, the sole federal program at the time.

“Where we started to where we are today, Governor Anoatubby has done a wonderful job,” he said.

“The Chickasaw Nation is doing a lot of remarkable things, and to be a part of that creates a lot of pride. A person needs to be proud to say, ‘I am Chickasaw, and I belong to a strong tribe,’ it speaks for itself in a lot of ways.”

Cornelius lives near Sulphur with his wife, Patti. Together, the couple has 21 grandchildren, who are learning the art of creating traditional art, such as the longbow.

About the Artesian

Arts Festival

Open to the public at no charge, the Artesian Arts Festival takes place 10 a.m.- 6 p.m. at the Artesian Plaza, adjacent to the Artesian Hotel and Spa, 1001 W. First St., Sulphur, Oklahoma on April 22..

For more information, contact Chickasaw Nation Arts & Humanities at (580) 272-5520, visit ArtesianArtsFestival.com or email ArtistInfo@Chickasaw. net.

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Gajin Fujita is a uniquely Los Angeles artist. Born to Japanese parents, Fujita (b. 1972) came up creatively during the 1980’s and ’90s in two of city’s influential graffiti crews, K2S and KGB. In the decades since, Fujita has defined a distinctive visual language that blends imagery from traditional Japanese culture—think samurai warriors and mythical beasts—with imagery from the city’s own unique culture.  

In his current solo exhibition “True Colors” at L.A. Louver, Fujita has created a dynamic world that melds Japanese ukiyo-e figures from the Edo period, including deities and beasts, with scenes pulled from the complexity of our own times. The works are also an homage to his native city. In Home Field LA (2020), the artist’s only self-portrait in the show, the artist is shown looking down on the skyline of downtown L.A. from the house where he grew up, the scene overlaid with patterns of Eastern textiles.  

Courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver.

He creates these multimedia works that blend spray paint, gold leaf, and drawing in his unique workspace—a deck and compact studio in the back of the Echo Park home he shares with his wife, photographer Angela Fujita. In this small space, Fujita stockpiles spray paint, stencils, and a surprising amount of art by the street artists he grew up with.  

Recently, he brought us in to his creative space and gave us a glimpse into his creative practice.  

Tell us about your studio. Where is it, how did you find it, what kind of space is it?
My studio is in Echo Park, Los Angeles. It’s a tiny, detached building that came with a wooden deck when I got my home in 2012. I do all my spraying out on the deck, and the studio itself is more of a storage space for all my materials. It’s cold during the winters and hot during the summers. 

Photo by Angela Fujita, courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver.

What made you choose this particular studio over others?
I chose this particular spot because I was looking for a home close to downtown, with a large outdoor where I could work. 

Do you have studio assistants or other team members working with you? What do they do?
So, I usually work alone, but on occasion I will have someone like my brother assist me in gilding gold leaf. I also have my fraternity of graffiti crew members come out and add flavor into the paintings with their tags. 

How many hours do you typically spend in the studio, what time of day do you feel most productive, and what activities fill the majority of that time?
Typically, I try to put in about 4 to 7 hours in the studio. My prime hours of playing with my paints will be in the afternoon to right before the sun starts to set. I try to fill most of my time in the studio to paint, but there are several different processes that involve making my paintings. There are times I will be working on gilding gold leaf onto the surfaces of the paintings, or at times I would be working on drawings and cutting out stencils in preparation to paint. 

Photo by Angela Fujita, courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver.

What is the first thing you do when you head to your studio?
I usually turn on some music after opening my studio. I’ve been listening to old hip hop radio shows, specifically the Stretch & Bobbito shows from the ‘90s. It was a show that came on after midnight on Thursday nights on WKCR 89.9 NYC. Lots of hip hop band mixtapes from the ‘90s like A Tribe Called Quest to the DITC. I like mixtapes because they’re continuous music for over an hour or more, so it doesn’t cause any interruption during work.

What is a studio task on your agenda this week that you are most looking forward to?
I’m always looking forward to painting or playing with paints and colors! Also preparing the stencils, cutting out the paper stencils with the X-Acto knife. After preparing the stencil I love handling the spray paint and actually making color choices spraying these colors with the use of the stencil. I also love to see the results of what I painted and the revealing phase of when you pull the stencil off the surface. 

What tool or art supply do you enjoy working with the most, and why? Please send us a snap of it.
I like my spray paints, they’re like a basketball to a basketball player.

Photo by Angela Fujita, courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver.

What kind of atmosphere do you prefer when you work? Is there anything you like to listen to/watch/read/look at etc. while in the studio for inspiration or as ambient culture?
Atmospherically, I like to be by myself and will have some sort of hip hop mix bumping while I paint. And when I’m in the studio I like reading and looking through books of Ukiyo-e woodblock print masters. Also, sometimes I just like listening to what’s going on in the environment surrounding me.

How do you know when an artwork you are working on is clicking? How do you know when an artwork you are working on is a dud?
I try to approach my paintings with a composition that’s planned in advance, so when I start painting, I’m working on something that’ll click and transpire into my vision.  

A black-and-white photograph by Angela Fujita, above a painting by the artist’s friend, Alex “Defer” Kizu. Photo by Angela Fujita, courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver.

What images or objects do you look at while you work? Do you have any other artist’s work in your studio? If so, please share a phone pic and tell the story behind it.
I look at a lot of colors with the spray paints I have in my studio. Also I do have a few of my friends’ artworks on the walls and in the studio. I have a work by Jesse Simon, my old friend from middle school who is also a member of KGB graffiti crew, and another by Kevin Bays, who was my classmate in graduate school. I also have a work by graffiti artist Miner WCA, and a painting by CAB K2S, an old childhood friend from the neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Next to CAB’s painting is an image of the LA Public Library card I collaborated with them on in 2019 using the image of my painting Guardian Angel (2016). There is also a photo on the wall taken and printed by my wife Angela Lee Fujita in 1992. It is a double exposure with one of the exposures being my torso. Lastly, there’s a painting leaning against a wall by an old friend and artist from middle school, Alex “Defer” Kizu. Defer is a member from the K2S graffiti crew. He painted this painting spontaneously and impulsively on a thick piece of watercolor paper. 

What’s the last museum exhibition or gallery show you saw that really affected you and why?
The last shows that had a huge effect on me were the Caravaggio and the Japanese armor shows that I saw at LACMA. With Caravaggio, I was just in awe to be standing in front of these paintings created by one of my heroes more than 400 years ago. With the Japanese armor show, I was fascinated how these armors made for Japanese warriors 500 years ago were made with not only protective designs in mind but had a lot of aesthetics and creative designs implied—as well with great craftsmanship. 

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Photo: John Spyrou

One afternoon in February, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith sat at a long table in the center of her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, surrounded by images and motifs that she returns to again and again in her artwork: sketches of George Armstrong Custer, coyote heads cast in resin, and paintings of re-imagined maps of the United States. To her left was a pile of notebooks, in which she collects words and phrases. She read from one: “Canoes. Empty Promises. Treaties.” Thumbing through another, she found a note to self: “Land acknowledgment: What’s it for?”

Just as these lines could serve as the starting point for much of her work, small talk with Smith soon grows into something bigger. She speaks deliberately and at length — about a book she’s reading, an artist she’s researching, or her disgust with Montana governor Greg Gianforte’s campaign to end federal Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. “I feel like they are massacring them,” she told me. “The idea of just hunting them for trophies, to take their heads — it’s criminal to me.”

The artist, who is 83, has been deploying symbols of American empire and Native identity in her work for decades, turning oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, prints, installation, and collage into wry political commentaries on post-genocidal existence. In Indian Madonna Enthroned, from 1974, her visual grammar emerges as a kind of three-dimensional collage using materials such as dried corn, pheasant wings, and beaded hide moccasins to create a figure of a Native woman sitting on a wooden chair and clutching the book God Is Red with an American flag on her lap. Smith can work with a disarming directness that cuts through her penchant for abstract and neo-Dadaist forms: In the 1992 installation Trade (Gifts for Trading Land With White People), a selection of sports memorabilia featuring racist Indian mascots hangs over her painting of a canoe. Spam, a work on canvas from 1995, shows a painted bison atop text spelling out its title, suggesting the slow genocide of lost food traditions.

When Smith started making these kinds of pieces in the early 1970s, she said, “Nobody knew what contemporary Native art was.” Breaking into the fine-arts scene meant avoiding the more traditional Santa Fe Indian Market, an annual fair where most Native American art was sold. It also meant struggling to find the right gallerist to sell her work, which sometimes evokes Kandinsky or Rauschenberg, though in landscapes adorned with tepees, petroglyphs, and animal tracks. Other work recalls Jasper Johns. Tinged with dark humor and irony, often wrung from satirical takes on Native American imagery, it was, to the Establishment, “bastardized art,” she said, “and they didn’t see it as true or authentic.”

Smith had no road map for the kind of career she wanted. So she charted her own course. Her work has helped to prove that modernism and indigeneity can coexist across a range of mediums and materials, including the hybrid of collage and abstract painting that has become a signature style. In the ’70s, she formed an art collective called the Grey Canyon Group alongside contemporaries such as Emmi Whitehorse and Conrad House; together, they would organize what Smith said was most likely the first U.S. traveling exhibition of living Native artists. Recently, her efforts have culminated in an impressive string of unprecedented honors: Three years ago, her 1992 painting Target became the first by a Native American artist to join the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art. This year, she’ll become the first artist to curate an exhibition there, highlighting works by roughly 50 living Native American artists. But before that, she will become the first Native American artist to have a career retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art: Her show “Memory Map” opens there on April 19. It will sprawl across two floors of the museum and include work made over the past five decades.

During Smith’s early trips to New York, she told me, “I’d be there looking out at the buildings and the neon lights and everything, and I would think, Nobody in New York knows that we’re alive. They don’t know there’s any Indians here. The American government doesn’t know we’re here. The art community has no idea.” In the decades since, Smith has learned to accept her role as an ambassador of sorts — even if she was shocked to learn that her painting could still be a first for the National Gallery.

“I am not one. I am one among many,” she said. “My community comes with me. This is how it’s always been since time immemorial. This is how we’ve survived.”

It was the physical experience of art that moved her: the sensation of dragging a stick across the dirt, at age 3, to create circles, lines, and figures representing a smaller, kinder world than the one she knew growing up in poverty. The shapes young Jaune created — animals, trees, mountains — were also a form of written language she could share with her father, an illiterate horse trader from the last generation of Salish people to grow up speaking their mother tongue; when he was sent to boarding school in the early 20th century, he was beaten for speaking it.

Jaune was born on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Her father gave her pictures of animals he’d drawn on scraps of paper, which she would carry in her pocket for weeks at a time. She brought them to school, where she studied alongside Japanese American children who had spent their earliest years in internment camps; to the fields where she worked year-round cutting rhubarb and picking seasonal fruits like strawberries and raspberries; and into the trees she climbed in search of a sturdy branch where she could hide and read books.

When I first spoke to Smith a couple of years ago, she summed up her childhood by saying she could see what was in store for her when reading the novels of John Steinbeck. Beyond her “dystopian” childhood, she imagined ending up like the Indians who came to trade horses with her father, “lost and grasping.” She felt hopeless. Then she realized that art could be more than a momentary escape. When she was 13, she watched the 1952 John Huston film Moulin Rouge, a fictionalized account of the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that gave her a different kind of hardship to dwell on: the struggles of an artist. She recognized his determination.

In high school, a counselor told her “Indians don’t go to college,” so instead of studying art or literature, she was forced to take vocational courses. The experience “was almost like getting punched in the stomach.” It didn’t stop her from pursuing art as a career. At age 16, she used money she made as a waitress and farmhand to study art through a popular correspondence course she saw advertised on the cover of a matchbook. After earning an associate art degree at a college in Washington State, she had children, then spent over a decade supporting her family as a waitress, janitor, and cannery worker. She sold her first work: a pastel piece that she remembers went for about $45. When she was able to earn a bachelor’s degree in 1976, it was in art education — the result, she told me, of a sexist system that deemed women more capable of teaching art than practicing it.

While in grad school at the University of New Mexico, she met the artists with whom she would form the Grey Canyon Group: Whitehorse, House, Larry Emerson, and Paul Willeto. She chose her gallery, Clarke-Benton in Santa Fe, in part because it represented several New York artists. At the time, this seemed about as close as a Native American could get to the cloistered Manhattan art world.

That changed for her in November 1979. That month, Smith began having shows in New York: One was on West 57th Street, around the corner from the Plaza, where her new gallerist, Jill Kornblee, gave Smith her first solo show. Later that same week, the landmark traveling show with the Grey Canyon Group opened at the American Indian Community House, a nonprofit gathering space for Indigenous New Yorkers. Smith’s friend G. Peter Jemison had set up the gallery there, and she visited every time she was in town. “I remember that we filled nail holes in the wall with toothpaste if we didn’t have the money for stucco or wood,” Smith told me. “And they were always having to move it because the rent would go up.”

At her home studio in Corrales, we were surrounded by the evidence of decades of work. A finished painting hung by the door: Shock and Awe, from 2011, which takes aim at the more recent misadventures of American empire in Iraq, depicting a mother and child in a blitzkrieg. Canvases were stacked against every wall, including a dozen or so works in progress from her series of reimagined maps of the U.S. She said that each of these is an explicit commentary on the land as a contested space; the map introduces American schoolchildren to their country in terms of its conquest by Europeans from east to west. “We see the map as a political tool,” Smith said. “It’s not an empty form to me. It’s not an icon of this incredible country.”

She reorients the map by turning it sideways and plasters it with newspaper clippings or images. In State Names Map I (2000), paint drips and oozes down the canvas to obscure what were once clearly delineated borders; Smith intended to leave only the names of states and territories derived from Indigenous sources visible, while those with European roots seem to be absent. In Tribal Map (2000), text is used to mark Indigenous communities, many of which have been moved from their homelands. Memory Map (2000), from which her Whitney retrospective draws its name, uses paintings of Indigenous petroglyphs that might be found in each area and brings to mind the stick figures she drew in the dirt as a little girl.

“I want everybody who walks in the gallery to say, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map shown that way,’” she said.

The maps’ message feels less like a public-service announcement than a scab she can’t help but pick at. Another wound she keeps returning to is the image of Custer, whose profile I saw peeking out from an otherwise blank canvas at the far end of the studio. He is a unifying motif for Native Americans: When I was growing up in Southeast Alaska, far from the plains where the U.S. Army officer waged war on nations including the Lakota Sioux and the Cheyenne in the late 19th century, I knew what he stood for long before I learned what the military had done to my own Tlingit ancestors. Among the Custer prints on display at the Whitney retrospective is one that plays on this infamy: In Coyote Made Me Do It! II (1993), Custer poses defiantly with his back to the trickster of Native American lore.

We drove to a much larger studio in a former furniture warehouse where Smith has been working on a series of canoes. “Jaune found this place,” said her son Neal Ambrose-Smith, who is also an artist. “Everything that we’re doing is in Corrales. We have our own little village that we’re able to make art in.” When we arrived, the first thing Smith did was introduce me to the team helping her prepare these mixed-media pieces alongside Ambrose-Smith: Matthew Eaton, Kelly Frye, and David Beams. She insisted that they each be credited as collaborators, which I found striking — in most cases, assistants and fabricators aren’t acknowledged at all.

“These people are all artists, too, and it’s important that their work is recognized,” Smith said.

She walked from one end of the warehouse to the other, showing me how, using reclaimed timber that they processed themselves, the team had crafted eight canoes — or, at least, the frameworks of canoes — made from long, thin strips of wood bound together with sinew and left uncovered. Most were suspended from the high ceiling, but one sat on the floor where it overflowed with sculptures of pills cast in plaster and a resin mixture, each a bit bigger than a human fist and modeled after an actual drug — OxyContin, Percocet. The canoe was made from Osage-orange wood, which Smith said had been used by Natives in Oklahoma for making bows, arrows, and cradleboards. Other canoes would be made from different woods and filled with different poisons.

“I’m using trade canoes to give back stuff that’s not good for us,” Smith said.

The legacy of Custer’s war on American Indians seemed to stare back at me from the canoe. Later, when I received the catalogue for “Memory Map,” its foreword reminded me of the intellectual legacy of relegating Native people to reservations and boarding schools: Before addressing Smith’s art or personhood, the catalogue acknowledges, briefly, that the Whitney’s “commitment to Indigenous art has been de minimis.” What “Memory Map” represents is not atonement for that sin but an embrace of sanity. Smith is one of America’s greatest living artists, and failing to acknowledge that would be madness.

At the core of her work, beyond the humor and irony and what her current gallerist Garth Greenan calls a “dense concatenation of art-historical references,” are the words she scribbles in a notebook: “Canoes. Empty Promises. Treaties.” Every piece has an earnest beginning. “It starts with a message,” Smith told me. “It starts with something true.”