Renatta Signorini is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Renatta by email at rsignorini@triblive.com or via Twitter .

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ENID, Okla. — The fact that he was born in Bison, Okla., comes as no surprise to Freddie Mack, who even years later finds it hard to describe the depths of the connection he feels toward Native Americans and the animal considered sacred to them — the buffalo.

It was simply meant to be, the location of his childhood, like all the other times that Mack has found himself pulled to a Native American artifact at an estate sale or a thrift store. Some might call it coincidence, but he believes it’s fate.

“You know, I was always intrigued,” he said, walking through his Enid-area, countryside home filled with Native American paintings and artwork, arrowheads, jewelry, weapons, beads and crafts. “When I was a little kid, I was intrigued by Indians and chiefs and all that.”

He has amassed quite a Native American collection, including original pieces and copies of artwork from unknown artists to the Enid area’s own Harold Holden.

Mack is proud of the “Keeper of the Plains” artwork he found in a local thrift store that now hangs in his home. Holden created the original artwork and sculpted the life-sized Native American monument, which stands on the Garfield County Court House lawn, through a Security National Bank commission.

It’s a symbol of this country’s heritage, Mack said, and a reminder, especially during this weekend’s celebration of Enid’s founding, that the Native Americans played a huge role in this country and in the settling of the Cherokee Outlet 130 years ago.

“They are a huge part of America,” Mack said.

He believes America would have been much stronger nation if Native Americans had been treated as individuals, and he says the Native heritage is just as strong in Northwest Oklahoma as the pioneers’ heritage.

Growing up in southern Garfield County, Mack is the youngest of Robert and Carleen Mack’s nine children. His great-great-grandmother, Francis Fannie Parsons Rudd, and her family operated a Native American school in Iowa, where they were descended from a Sioux chief, Mack said. She made the Land Run of 1893 and settled northeast of Bison, where his family still owns the homestead. She died in the mid-1890s.

Mack graduated from Waukomis High School in 1985, attended Northwestern Oklahoma State University and has worked with Enid Public Schools in freight/delivery for more than 30 years.

He said he always has been told stories of Native Americans, having himself his father’s Sioux heritage as well as Cherokee heritage, on his mother’s side. Though his father never placed the family on the Native American rolls — Mack believes he was too proud of his German heritage to register — he listened to the tales from relatives at family reunions of his ancestor, Chief Rudd, a Sioux leader, whose tribe placed him in a wagon upon his death, cremated it during a ceremony and spread his ashes around a mountain in homage.

Mack has visited the monument for Geronimo and remembers his father taking him to Anadarko and seeing the teepees and ceremonies and purchasing him a Native American belt.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of money. But I begged Dad …” Mack remembers.

Throughout the years Mack continued to be drawn to his heritage and to finding Native American artifacts to which he believes he was led, and he’s experienced situations that were spiritual in nature. He remembers being surrounded by a herd of buffalo in his car while driving through Southwest Oklahoma near Lawton and feeling a connection with one that came close to his vehicle.

It was afterward that he chose the name Chief White Buffalo, Loved By the Buffalo for himself to honor that affection and connection.

He has so many tales to share — once he was going home after a day of garage sales, but he found one more. He arrived and the Native American woman at the home was so joyful to see him and send him home with the last item, a ceremonial feather, that will be buried with him someday.

Connections like that have been following him his whole life, he said, and are heart-felt.

“It’s time,” he said, “to give them the respect they deserve.”

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A wavy white metal scrim of a sculpture shades the entrance to the Gorman Museum of Native American Art’s new home. Perched on tall white steel posts, the graceful form undulates and curves overhead like a ribbon, gift wrapping the low, pagoda-like mid-century building and dappling the ground below with triangular shadows that echo archetypal patterns found throughout indigenous cultures, from Oceania to the Arctic.

“The triangle is very important,” says the work’s creator, artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (pronounced Sin-na-jinny), who is also the museum’s director. “You can find the triangle pattern in California basketry, in designs in Hawaii, in the feathered cloaks in New Zealand, so it speaks internationally. Everybody will take away what they want from it.”

Tsinhnahjinnie, 69, is calling from the road in June—she’s just been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to finalize the sale of three of her own works. The museum had previously been gifted a print of Vanna Brown, Azteca Style, a collage depicting a Native Vanna White decked out in ceremonial regalia, gazing out from inside an old-fashioned black-and-white TV, as part of a larger bequest.

“They wanted to see more works in that series, and so they acquired three more,” she says.

Gorman Museum director Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, whose photography resides in the collections of the Smithsonian and New York’s MoMA, teaches a full course load in the UC Davis Native American Studies department, including a class titled Visual Sovereignty.

Tsinhnahjinnie—who identifies as “two-spirit,” a Native American term for one who embodies both male and female spirits—is also a full-time faculty member in the Native American Studies department. (UC Davis is one of only four schools in the country to offer a Ph.D. program in that subject. The others are the University of Arizona, the University of Alaska and the University of New Mexico.) She became museum director in 2004 and began what she calls the process of “manifesting” the reborn museum. “We came from a really small, humble space,” she says. “I like to say it’s the little museum that did.”

Her partner in manifestation is executive director Veronica Passalacqua, 55, who also arrived in 2004, via stints at Christie’s auction house and the Barbican Centre, a performing arts center in London. Together they quietly grew the Gorman Museum’s collection from 286 works to more than 2,000 today, mostly through donations and gifts from artists. Along the way, they attracted a handful of grants as well as university investment for the expansion. The painter Annie Ross—an indigenous studies professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada and a Maya Tribe member—was a Ph.D. student in Native American studies at UC Davis in the early 2000s, and remembers it as a time of great synergy, when departments at the school were feeding off of one another for growth and inspiration.

“There were stellar people at UC Davis when I was there,” says Ross. “I had a studio in the art department. Gary Snyder was teaching poetry. I also had some interface with the Applied Sciences department because I was writing about the nuclear industry on indigenous homelands for my dissertation. And then Veronica came in to run the Gorman and it took off under her leadership. It blossomed and fluoresced.”

Passalacqua, an energetic Italian American in shimmery silver jewelry, meets me on a spring morning to tour the new space, where lights have still to be hung.

Executive director Veronica Passalacqua at the Gorman Museum on July 21 in front of a restored six-panel 1975 mural by the Artist Hopid collective depicting the Hopi ceremonial calendar

The fact that cultural lore imbues the museum’s elegant entrance sculpture is only fitting for this institution—one that has deftly combined a knack for innovation with a passion for preservation since its founding in 1973. Beneath it, the museum’s entrance—on a corner facing the UC Davis Arboretum’s native plants section—is transparent. Layers of glass frame a space that will eventually become its gift shop, leading into the galleries, which surround a soaring atrium.

For years, the museum’s gallery occupied 1,200 square feet inside the Native American Studies department building deep within the campus. Great for students, but hard for the general public to access. Now it’s taken over the 4,000-square-foot space in the former faculty club building, which has become a part of a growing strip of public-facing cultural amenities along the southern edge of campus, recently designated as the Gateway District, which includes the Arboretum, the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, and the Manetti Shrem Museum.

READ MORE: The Art of Architecture: Our Behind the Scenes Look at the Design and Opening of the Manetti Shrem Museum

This September, the museum will celebrate both its grand opening in a freshly renovated building and its 50th anniversary, with a show of Contemporary California Native Art as well as selections from the permanent collection.

But the real beginning of the Gorman Museum is a few years older than that, albeit unofficially, as Passalacqua tells the story. “Carl [Gorman] was only here for a few years, but he started amassing stuff so that he could teach his studio art classes, but he was also starting to teach a little bit of art history by using objects and bringing things in,” she says. “He started filling up two Quonset huts with things that inspired him.” Campus lore holds that students pinned a sign above the door that read “Gorman Museum.” When Gorman retired in 1973, the University made it official, establishing an art institution in honor of this charismatic founding faculty member whose lasting impact on the campus belies his relatively brief tenure.

The museum’s namesake himself has an origin story you might want to make a batch of popcorn for. Having grown up on the Navajo reservation in Chinle, Arizona, Carl Nelson (C.N.) Gorman was recruited by the Marine Corps in April 1942 to become one of 29 original “code talkers.” The close-knit group of native Navajo speakers crafted an impossible-to-break code that was deployed during World War II, and today they are widely credited with helping win the battle of Iwo Jima.

Although socially marginalized, Navajo soldiers didn’t experience the same kind of overt racism Black troops did, according to Gorman’s youngest daughter, Zonnie Gorman, 60, who told me the story, calling from New Mexico where she’s finishing up her dissertation on the history of the code talkers. “It’s what I call an ignorant prejudice,” she says. “Indian men were stereotyped; they tended to be hyper-masculinized. This has a long history in the military where they were seen as almost superhuman that they could see in the dark; shoot 5,000 yards and hit bull’s-eyes. They were just given these superhuman qualities. They were never referred to by their names; they were just called ‘Chief.’ ”

Gorman’s wartime experiences inspired his resolve to become an artist and work to change that perception. He used the G.I. Bill to get an advanced degree in art and commercial art at what is now the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. In the 1950s, he worked for Douglas Aircraft as a technical illustrator, and began painting. “He studied European artists and styles of painting,” Zonnie says. “But then he took that and made it something uniquely his own, using Navajo and Native topics and his culture.” He dabbled in mosaics, ceramics and jewelry design, and in the 1960s, he moved back to the Navajo reservation, becoming the director of the Navajo Cultural Center in 1966. “He was an artist at heart but kept getting drawn into other things,” Zonnie adds. 

The museum’s namesake Carl Nelson Gorman, a former World War II Navajo code talker, helped found the Native American Studies program at UC Davis.

The same stereotyping he encountered in the military followed him into the arts. “The fact that he kept getting boxed into this idea of what an Indian should paint was very much something that he experienced and pushed back against,” says Zonnie. 

By the time he was tapped to join the faculty at Davis (Zonnie would be a grade-schooler throughout that tenure), her father had developed the sensibility that would inform the eventual museum’s mission of challenging cultural stereotyping. “He wanted his students to be free to be who they were, and being Native American was definitely foremost. But it wasn’t about being an ‘Indian artist,’ ” Zonnie explains. “It was more about being an artist and having the freedom to celebrate all of those cultural aspects. That was my father’s philosophy, and it was fundamental to the founding of the museum.”

When Gorman joined the UC Davis faculty in 1969, he was one of four to co-found the Native American Studies Program, organized under the College of Agriculture and Environment, making it the first such program in California. His adult son, R.C. (Rudolph Carl) Gorman, a renowned artist in his own right, had just the year before borrowed money from his parents to open the first Native-owned art gallery, so the Gorman name was already prominent in the arts. In fact, Zonnie remembers her father stopping at roadside antique shops to gather “museum” items on road trips to visit her older brother in Taos. The Gormans were the original manifesters.

As Passalacqua continues the tour through the new museum space, there are tantalizing hints at what the inaugural show—scheduled to open with two days of events on Sept. 22 and 23—will feature, including works on a grand scale. Leaning against one wall, and still partially wrapped in plastic, is a big, vibrantly hued classical painting by Judith Lowry—a Nevada City artist and member of the Maidu and Pit River tribes whose work also hangs in the Smithsonian. With all the regal pomp and circumstance of a portrait by Kehinde Wiley (the Black artist best known for painting the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama), this painting depicts a Native American man seated on a throne gazing out past a supplicating white woman who kneels at his feet, presenting him with the Stars and Stripes.

Nevada City artist Judith Lowry was exposed to Renaissance painters Giotto, Botticelli and Fra Angelico at age 6, when her military family was stationed in Europe. Those early influences can be seen here in her Medicine Man painting.

The inaugural show will also highlight a handful of late California artists—ones who Tsinhnahjinnie thinks deserve a wider audience. “Frank LaPena, Harry Fonseca, Brian Tripp,” she says. “They were very dear to the communities that surround them. So, the general public may not have an idea of why some of these artists are treasured.” After this show, they will.

For example, the Sacramento-born Maidu artist Harry Fonseca’s prints depict Coyote the trickster in drag (as seen below) or as a biker dude, in a joyfully primitive style. Sacramento State professor and longtime director of the Native American Studies department Frank LaPena—who the Autry Museum of the American West, located in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, said “defined a generation of Native artists”—depicts ceremonial deer dancers as painterly, dreamscape-inhabiting mythical beings. And former Humboldt State University professor Brian Tripp’s work includes precise, jazzy drawings that are a riff on basketwork motifs.

As we continue the tour, I see three display cases that are already full of baskets and pottery—some from Gorman’s original collection, some more recently acquired. They are there to provide historical and cultural context to the contemporary artwork. “I wanted to have dense, visible storage,” Passalacqua says, so that students, artists and museumgoers could see the lineage of creative ideas, from the traditional to the avant-garde.

The open, browsable racks of paintings and objects contain a trove from the permanent collection, some which will be on view during the opening exhibition and some that won’t. An imposing, pastel-hued pot by R.C. Gorman—its modern shapes and colors echoing the other historical specimens. A vibrant, semi-abstract herd of horses engulfed in a cloud of dust by C.N. Gorman, reminiscent of rock art and cave paintings. Colorful abstractions by George Longfish, the museum’s longtime original director, and prints from the 1970s by Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak so graphical and groovy they look like they could have hung at the original Nut Tree in Vacaville. 

Coyote Woman by Harry Fonseca (Courtesy of the Gorman Museum of Native American Art)

Passalacqua says the word has gone out to artists about the Gorman’s grander scale, and they’re all vying to program its soaring atrium. Napa artist Lewis deSoto has pitched a giant blow-up figure sculpture akin to a recent self portrait of himself as a “Skookum doll”—a fake Native-themed souvenir doll popular in the early 20th century. “He wants to do this giant, 12-foot-tall blow-up,” Passalacqua says, laughing and throwing up her hands in an “I give up” gesture. 

Delaware Nation sculptor and photographer Holly Wilson told me on a phone call from her studio in Oklahoma that her 2018 solo show at the Gorman was nothing short of career-making. The cover of the catalog from her show is an image of a wall-sized grid of tiny figures titled Under Our Skin, each a bust of a woman’s head and shoulders, and sculpted from different colored crayons. It’s an essay on difference and sameness, with a child’s innocent perspective evoked by the materials and color palette.

“I fall into a void because I don’t fit into the old guard mindset of what is Native. I think there’s still the old guard who want what you would think is traditional art even though that’s not really true because Native art always evolved,” Wilson says. “A Native art group would go, ‘Oh, your work looks way more contemporary, a contemporary curator should deal with you.’ And someone contemporary would go, No, you belong in the Native or indigenous camp.’ That has been my biggest struggle. But the Gorman doesn’t do that.”

The exhibit catalog has served her as a calling card and gotten her more opportunities than she would have landed without it. “The show that I created for them has become one that I’ve shown in New Mexico, California and Florida. It also went to Pennsylvania,” she says. “It’s traveled all over the place.” More solo shows mean more exposure, and more private sales.

Tsinhnahjinnie also points out that viewers benefit too, when artists show their work in person. “When you see a piece by Holly Wilson in 3D, in front of you, it moves you,” she says.

But the group shows are where the Gorman’s mission comes into its own. One that opened in late 2019 was called Indigenous Futurisms, a play on Afrofuturism coined by Grace Dillion, editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. “This show was basically sci-fi, comic books and gaming,” Passalacqua says. Visitors could play Native-designed video or board games, like Honwedom, the Maidu Game of Life, which teaches players about life in the precontact Sierras, or lounge in the gallery reading comic books like Super Indian (“Once a rez boy! Now a hero!”) by Arigon Starr of the Kickapoo Tribe. “And I had Star Wars playing on the TV in Navajo—because it was issued in Navajo—so that was the sound in the gallery,” Passalacqua says, adding that the show’s first fans were the Star Wars super fans the university sent over from the computer lab to program everything. “They wanted to hear it in Navajo because they knew every word in English,” she says.

“The sci-fi element I brought to the table with the visual art,” says Passalacqua. “I like to surprise people. Those kind of shows expose new people to the idea that Native American art isn’t just rugs and baskets.”

Works from that show now reside in the permanent collection, like K’ómoks Tribe member Andy Everson’s Resistance, a stunning portrait of a stormtrooper-like masked figure adorned in Pacific Northwest totemic designs that’s both imposing and whimsical, serious and fun. Or Chemehuevi Tribe member Cara Romero’s Arla Lucia, a photographic portrait melding Wonder Woman regalia with Native American ceremonial dress to create a cross-cultural super heroine—a work that will hang in the grand opening show.

If one believes even a little in the concept of spirit, then it’s easy to imagine Carl Gorman’s inhabiting and inspiring this cohort of artists who have finally taken that very same set of “super Indian” stereotypes that first inspired him to take up a paintbrush, and worked them into something poetic, meaningful and potent. It’s quite a legacy—from code talker to barrier breaker.

Annie Ross, that Davis alum so shaped by her experiences, both as a student and later an exhibitor, sums up the Gorman Museum’s meaning and mission best. “They just open arms to all the diverse artists, philosophies, methods, materials and new ways of expressing contemporary and ancient indigenous ideas for a larger audience. It’s on the soul level, the journey level,” she says, a smile in her voice. “It’s an impossible dream.”

BOGOTA, Colombia — Fernando Botero, one of Latin America’s most celebrated artists, has died. According to his daughter, Lina Botero, the 91-year-old Colombian artist was suffering from complications from pneumonia and died at his home in Monaco.

“Fernando Botero, the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues, has died,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced on social media.

In his paintings and sculptures, Botero often depicted rotund, whimsical figures that poked fun at the upper class of his native Colombia.

Born in Medellín, he was the son of a traveling salesman and a seamstress and once harbored a desire to be a matador.

He spent most of his life living in Europe and the United States, but often returned to Colombia for inspiration. His home city has declared a week of mourning in his honor.

Botero’s works are instantly recognizable. His figures are corpulent and slightly absurd.

One painting depicts a Roman Catholic cardinal fast asleep in full clerical garb. Another shows a snake about to bite the head of a woman posing for a family portrait and gave rise to the term “Boterismo” to describe the voluptuous, almost cartoonish figures in his artwork.

Later in his career, Botero turned to darker subjects, like drug violence in Colombia. During an open-air concert in his home town of Medellín in 1995, guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, placed an explosive device beneath his bronze sculpture, “Pájaro” (“Bird”), killing more than 20 people and injuring more than 200.

He also painted victims of U.S. abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” he said.

His works were hugely popular, sometimes selling for millions of dollars, and adorned major museums as well as the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Park Avenue in New York, as well as his home town of Medellín and the capital Bogotá, where the Botero Museum resides.

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Renowned Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, whose depictions of people and objects in plump, exaggerated forms became emblems of Colombian art around the world, has died. He was 91.

Lina Botero told the Colombian radio station Caracol that her father died Friday morning in Monaco of pneumonia complications.

Botero depicted politicians, animals, saints and scenes from his childhood in an inflated and colorful form that was instantly recognizable. During his lifetime the artist attained global fame and influence, despite his humble origins, and his paintings were exhibited in museums globally, while his imposing bronze sculptures can be found in the parks and avenues of many European and Latin American capitals.

“His success was truly immense” Botero’s son Juan Carlos, wrote in a biography of his father, published in 2010. “Fernando Botero has created a unique style, that is original and easy to recognize.”

Botero’s paintings fetched millions of dollars at international auctions, and the artist was highly esteemed in his native Colombia, not just because of his success abroad, but due to the generous donations he made to his home country, including 23 statues, that are now in a park in downtown Medellín, and have become one of the city’s most visited attractions.

Botero also donated 180 paintings to Colombia’s Central Bank which were used to create the Botero Museum in Bogotá. His sculpture of a white, chubby pigeon, standing proudly on a pedestal became an emblem of Colombia’s efforts to make peace with rebel groups and is currently placed in a prominent gallery inside the nation’s presidential palace.

Many Colombians appreciated Botero’s art because it evokes nostalgia for the country as it was in the early 20th century. His characters wear bowler hats, and sport neatly trimmed mustaches. They move around in a colorful universe of green hills and lush trees, where homes are made with clay roof tiles.

“The painter of our traditions and our defects, the painter of our virtues has died,” President Gustavo Petro wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Friday. “He painted violence and peace. He painted the pigeon that was rejected one thousand times, and put one thousand times on a throne.”

Botero was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, Colombia. As a child he was enrolled by an uncle in a bullfighting school that he soon left, but it was a world captured later in his paintings. Botero decided at age 14 to dedicate his life to the arts, after managing to sell some sketches of bullfights to fans outside the city’s bullfighting arena. His mother supported the decision, but told him he would have to pay for his studies.

As a teenager, Botero participated in a group exhibition in Bogotá, and had his first individual exhibition there in 1951. In the following year, he went to Madrid to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

From Europe, he traveled to Mexico to study the work of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

During his travels, Botero married Gloria Zea, with whom he had three children, Fernando, Lina and Juan Carlos. Returning to Bogotá in 1958, he was appointed professor at the School of Arts of the National University. He later divorced and took up residence in New York in 1960, where he arrived with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket.

In the 1960s Botero began experimenting with the volume of objects and people in his paintings. His original and plump creations attracted the attention of art critics and, by then, the painter had created hundreds of drawings as well as some 1,000 paintings.

Botero remarried in 1964 with Cecilia Zambrano, who he also later divorced. In 1970 they had a son, Pedro, who died four years later in a car accident in Spain. Botero captured the pain of his son’s death in the painting “Pedrito” that depicts his son riding a toy horse and wearing a blue police officer’s uniform. He also donated 16 works to the Museum of Antioquía, in Medellín, to honor the boy and in turn the museum named a room in memory of “Pedrito Botero.”

In the 1970s, Botero put aside painting and began to experiment with sculptures in bronze, marble and cast iron, which brought him great success. In 1978 Botero returned to painting, and then alternated between the two disciplines.

In his paintings, the artists depicted scenes of daily life, such as a family picnic or a party in an early 20th century ballroom. But he also tackled political subjects, like the death of drug dealer Pablo Escobar, or the emergence of rebel groups.

In 1995, his bronze sculpture “The Bird,” weighing more than 1.8 tons and displayed in a park in Medellín, was dynamited by unknown attackers, causing the death of 22 people and injuring more than 200.

In 2005, Botero created a series of 79 paintings that depicted U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, just a year after the incident came to light. The artist struggled to get the paintings shown in U.S. museums, but they were eventually exhibited at the University of California Berkeley, which still houses some of the paintings.

Indian Theater
Jennifer Krasinski

Resistance, performance, and self-determination are at the forefront of a dazzling display of works by over three dozen
Native artists and collectives.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, installation view. Courtesy Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Pictured, far left: James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai, and Mexican), War Dance Technology (Left), 1990. Acrylic on sneaker with found objects.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, curated by Candice Hopkins, with curatorial research led by Amelia Russo, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, through November 26, 2023

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In 1969, the Institute of American Indian Arts published Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress, a bulletin-manifesto created by IAIA director Lloyd Kiva New and drama and dance instructor Rolland Meinholtz, which presented certain Indigenous principles and practices as guidelines for the development of a multivocal Indian vanguard. In traditions—conceived before white supremacy oppressed and malformed the imagination—there is possible futurity, and models of resistance. With this proposal, curator Candice Hopkins begins the exhilarating and essential Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, a touchstone survey of Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native contemporary artists whose practices, deliberately and otherwise, deploy performance and the performative—theater and the theatrical—to create critical, political works of art.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, installation view. Courtesy Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Pictured: New Red Order, Conscientious Conscripture, 2018–ongoing. Step and repeat, feather flag, retractable banner, foam board print, tablecloth, HD videos, rotary phone.

1969 was also the year that the group who called themselves the Indians of All Tribes began the Occupation of Alcatraz, launching a new wave of Native activists resolved to free themselves from the whim and mercy of the nation that built itself upon their decimation. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which acknowledged the autonomy of certain tribes and allowed them a greater degree of authority over how they administered federal funds. Indian Theater presents forty-two artists and collectives working from these robust roots across live performances, videos, paintings, sculptures, sound recordings, ephemera, and installations to present a continuously flourishing lineage—perhaps even call it a birthright—of artistic self-possession and resistance.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, installation view. Courtesy Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Photo: Karl Rabe. Pictured, center left: Nicholas Galanin (Lingít and Unangax̂), White Carver, 2012–ongoing. Installation and performance with sketchbook, tools, carving apron, carved blanks, chopping block, woodchips, framed photos of past carvers.

Performance always involves the question of “role playing,” and a documentary on view about the mighty Spiderwoman Theater, formed in New York City in 1976, captures the all-female company onstage and off. Scenes from their production Lysistrata Numbah! (1977) are punctuated by candid interviews on the subjects of marriage, motherhood, artistry, and abortion. Muriel Miguel, Spiderwoman’s founding force, explains the complex ramifications of abortion for Native women: “I think it’s a choice of each woman, and it’s not a choice of a man, for instance, in the Indian Movement to say, ‘but that’s genocide and you should not do it, because you’re killing Indian people and we need Indian people in this world.’ That’s true. But not if it’s at the cost of a woman’s life, of her happiness. The child’s happiness too.”

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, installation view. Courtesy Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Pictured: Theo Jean Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish), 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99, 2015.

To memorialize the forgotten and erased contributions of Native women to the Indian resistance movement, Ruth Cuthand created her Ghost Dance series, of which two vibrant, hypnotic paintings from the mid-1980s depicting Native dresses are on view. In another room of the exhibition, her son, Theo Jean Cuthand, advocates for others who’ve been forgotten and erased. His very funny video, 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99 (2015), is a satirical infomercial for an advice hotline for First Nations queers who find themselves without support or guidance from their elders and ancestors. “Want to talk to someone in the spirit and the flesh instead of reading The Spirit and the Flesh,” Cuthand slyly pitches to the camera, holding up a copy of Walter Williams’s classic 1986 history of the “sexual diversity” within Indigenous tribes. Recovering suppressed desire is the focus of Rosalie Favell’s Pillow Box Suite (1999), three light boxes featuring stills taken from the television show Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), particularly popular among the sapphic set, of women touching each other’s bodies—foregrounding the sexual chemistry once relegated to subtext.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, installation view. Courtesy Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Pictured, left to right: Walter Scott (Kahnawá:ke), Piranah Pants, 2019; Walter Scott (Kahnawá:ke), Dirt Chapter, 2015.

For Kite, Native tradition seems to be offered as a kind of counterbalance to technology’s death drive. Her mysterious, disquieting video L-Sys (Lakota System) [Projection from Listener] (2018) is propelled by a soundscape interweaving feed from a police scanner with ominous music, and a glitchy text in which phrases like “dream you hear it” are incanted again and again over animated shapes, based on those created and traditionally used by Lakota woman, that here bloom and fall, framed at the center of the screen as through a telescope. If for Kite language—both words and symbols—is the communicating vessel, other artists deploy objects as supple, porous containers of human life and its traces: two sculptures by Jeneen Frei Njoontli comprise tarps molded to suggest what might be hiding beneath them; three by Walter Scott conjure absent bodies.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, installation view. Courtesy Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Photo: Olympia Shannon. Pictured, far right: Kent Monkman (Cree member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory [Manitoba]), Louis Vuitton Quiver, 2007.

Then there are artworks that address how Native culture sometimes resists, other times acquiesces to, capitalism’s allure. Kent Monkman’s fabulous Louis Vuitton Quiver (2007) is the perfect luxury brand accessory for hunters who want to keep their arrows sharp while looking chic. James Luna’s War Dance Technology (Left) (1990)—a sneaker mounted on springs and bedecked with feathers, bells, and beads—is ingeniously handmade, if nowhere near couture. In one of the show’s funniest examples of role reversal, Nicholas Galanin tasks the performer of White Carver (2012–ongoing) to sit in a gallery, on display for visitors to see, and whittle wood into the shape of a sex toy designed for cis-male pleasure. (The joke writes itself.) The most complicated punchline regarding purchase power belongs to Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil of New Red Order, whose clamorous installation Conscientious Conscripture (2018–ongoing) looks like a sales booth at a New Age Expo. Their product: a system by which folks can overcome the limitations imposed by our “globalized, capitalist, settler colonial society.” Their tagline: “Never settle!” And if you need proof that you’re a clear-eyed rider of the changing tides, there’s plenty of merch for you to buy.

Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota), drone video still from Mirror Shield Project, 2016. Mirror shields and drone video. Photo: Rory Wakemup.

As Indian Theater affirms, resistance, like performance, is a time-based art form, one that must shift and unfold in response to the shifting, unfolding world. Cannupa Hanska Luger began his Mirror Shield Project in 2016 in support of the activists at the Oceti Sakowin Camp protecting the water at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Luger, as the title suggests, built mirrored shields for the activists to hold up to the police and members of the Dakota Access Pipeline, so the aggressors would see themselves, their own actions, instead of their targets. In the video on view, the assembled activist-performers line up and walk to create the shape of the water serpent believed to ward off the oil pipelines, holding their shields overhead, toward the camera hovering above them. The sight is brilliant—a moving, gleaming symbol of self-defense—its reflection invoking the viewer, inviting us to reflect in our turn on the various roles we may choose to play in all of this.

Jennifer Krasinski is a writer and critic, and frequent contributor to Artforum, Bookforum, and more.

Resistance, performance, and self-determination are at the forefront of a dazzling display of works by over three dozen Native artists and collectives.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – Lexington-based muralist Wylie Caudill has been picked to create the official artwork of Kentucky Derby 150.

Caudill says his work will be featured in programs, on tickets and with other branding. He also says he will be making murals located in Louisville and some out-of-state locations, as well.

A Churchill Downs spokesperson says special edition prints of his artwork will go on sale September 16 at the race track and at the Derby Museum.

Born and raised in Cynthiana, Caudill says he was always passionate about art. But it was when he left home to attend EKU that he shaped his style.

“You know when I was in college, I was doing a lot of chalk art and I kind of became known for large scale art, in general,” said Caudill.

Caudill says he finds the format fun and forgiving.

“Like, you can’t really stand very close to a mural and see the whole thing,” Caudill said. “You have to stand really far back, and your brain just automatically puts together brush strokes to create an image.”

Those larger-than-life images dot his hometown, downtown Lexington and beyond. But he sees this next project as his biggest yet.

“The Kentucky derby is just the epitome of Kentucky,” said Caudill.

Caudill is the artist behind the 150th run for the roses – with roses holding a heavy influence on his piece.

“Every rose has a little bit of a meaning. there’s the red rose, which are really obvious,” Caudill said. “But the pink and white roses were presented to the winning horse, historically, before red roses.”

He added that the blue roses were of personal significance and the gold were to commemorate this 150th running of the race.

Caudill hopes the piece captures 150 years of history, while also celebrating 150 more to come.

As the world waits for the first weekend in May, this Kentuckian waits for them to see his talent painted all over the most exciting two minutes in sports.

“It’s my first time that my artwork has been so global, and I’m letting it sink in, but it definitely hasn’t yet,” said Caudill.

The 150th Kentucky Derby is set for May 4, 2024.

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The annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration, happening this weekend in Macon, is set to bring Native American tribes to town to share their stories, both old and new.

MACON, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – The annual Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration, happening this weekend in Macon, is set to bring Native American tribes to town to share their stories, both old and new.

Superintendent of the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, Calra Beasley, says the event is a celebration of the Southeastern Native American culture.

Representatives from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Seminole Tribe of Florida will be at the Indigenous Celebration.

“The tribes that were located here were forcibly removed. They had no choice,” Beasley said. “So this is a time where we can celebrate that they are still here, still thriving, and celebrate that culture.”

For more than 30 years, the Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration has come to Macon in recognition of the city’s history as the ancestral homeland of the Muskogee (Creek) people.

“This is an opportunity for you to meet and talk with the people who actually experience this culture every day,” Beasley said.

The celebration will feature storytelling and educational programs hosted by Indigenous people, as well as live demonstrations like traditional craftsmanship, music and dances.

It will also include modern day art and stories with the Ocmulgee to Okmulgee art exhibit at the McEachern Art Center, Fire Starters Film Festival and Ignite the Night benefit concert at the Grand Opera House.

“On one side of the river, you’re at the mounds, you’re gonna see the cultural side of it, and then across the river, you’re gonna see the contemporary side of it,” Director of Advocacy for the Ocmulgee National Park & Preserve Initiative Tracy Revis said.

Revis says it’s important for people to see the resilient experiences of Muscogee (Creek) people who are still alive today.

“We want to educate this community about who we are,” Revis explained. “Not only who we were historically given that this is our ancestral homelands, but who we are today.”

Randy Kemp is one of the artists featured at the Ocmulgee to Okmulgee exhibit. For Kemp, art is a way to keep him connected to his heritage.

“It’s about us today,” Kemp said. “Folks need to know that we’re still here. It’s about the challenges that we’re facing as well. We’re just like anyone else.”

Kemp hopes people who come out to the Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration will learn something new about the people and history of Macon.

Muscogee artist Bobby Martin also has art on display at the McEachern Art Center. He says his art reflects family history and the effect of the past on the present.

Martin’s hope is that visitors to the exhibit will see themselves and their families in the art.

“We stand on the shoulders of those generations that came before us, and so I’d just like to give honor and bring some recognition to family and ancestry,” Martin said.

The art exhibit and Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration are both free to the public.

The Ocmulgee to Okmulgee exhibit is open Thursday through Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m., and the Indigenous Celebration is happening Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m.

Parking for the Indigenous Celebration will be available at the Macon-Bibb Health Department located at 171 Emery Highway. Attendees will then be taken to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Park by shuttle.

You can find more information about the Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration by clicking here.