Gallery and Collection of Native American Art. Uppsala, Sweden.
November is National Native American Heritage month in the U.S. hence native art figures more frequently in the news than it usually does. To honor the month Rice University´s student newspaper, The Rice Thresher, has a list of ”5 Native American Artists you should know” complete with decent introductions. There are some names that are new to me, particularly some musical acts I need to check out.
Give it a read here
We’ve been waiting for this to happen and we’re mighty glad it did. Museum of Northern Arizona is hosting an exhibition themed around Native Art inspired by the movie franchise Star Wars. The movies have attracted quite a substantial number of Native artists in recent years and have become a pop-cultural touchstone of sorts. We wrote about this attraction on the blog back in 2017 and have since then seen the interest grow even larger. It is always interesting to see artists interpret the space saga in their particular ways. There is a highly readable article in Forbes which charts the different aspects to Star Wars that might explain the appeal it holds to Native artists. The aspects range from the philosophical and political ideas guiding the heroes of Star Wars to similarities in the landscapes. The desert scenery of Luke Skywalker’s childhood home planet Tatooine will in particular resonate with artists familiar with the nature around New Mexico and Arizona.
The Force Is With Our People at Museum of Northern Arizona is on view trough March 2020 and includes Kiva Gallery favorites Ryan Singer and Randy Kemp.
Patrick Dean Hubbell is a relatively young artist but his art feels mature. That’s a pretty cliché way to start an exposé of an artist you actually admire. Might even be a bit belittling. Sorry Patrick Dean Hubbell, I’m not good at intros! What I mean to say is that a lot of thought and consideration seems to have gone into Dean Hubbell’s art. I respect that. Now, to get through this introduction as smoothly as possible, let’s stick to some facts. Patrick Dean Hubbell is Navajo. He graduated art school 2010. He lives and works on the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona.
Dean Hubbell’s art is not easy to categorize. It is part disciplined geometric control and part total painterly abandon. It feels traditional and new at the same time.
One gets the feeling that Dean Hubbell is somebody who follows his own path. But sometimes he veers close to others. One of Dean Hubbell’s main inspirations is Jackson Pollock. It was not a connection I had spontaneously made but when I came across a video of Dean Hubbell talking about his admiration for Pollock it made perfect sense. Pollock was, of course, famously inspired by Navajo sand painting, so Dean Hubbell’s admiration of him closes a circle of sorts. But that is only a superficial kinship. The spirit of Pollock can be traced deeper, in the way Dean Hubbell works and thinks about his work. In the same video, which can be seen on the artist’s webpage, we see Dean Hubbell crouched down on the ground, gathering soil from his native, Navajo land. He will use it as pigment for his paintings. Like Pollock, Dean Hubbell lays his canvas flat on the ground and proceeds to rub the processed reddish soil into the canvas. While being largely abstract, Dean Hubbell’s art in this way manages to address questions of belonging and identity in a way that goes beyond representation. There is something profoundly moving in knowing that the artist’s homeland is physically present when the viewer encounters the painting in the gallery. Such indexes of artistic presence can also be experienced in Pollock’s work, which sometimes includes cigarette ashes and footprints and whatever gravity decided fit for it’s pull.
Important though his influence may be, I would say that Dean Hubbell’s affinity to Pollock is only half the story. For where Pollock welcomed chance and accident as part of his creative process, with Dean Hubbell there is often a force to counteract the uncontrolled and chaotic. With an eye for strong patterns and graphic clarity, Dean Hubbell’s painting often juxtapose Pollockian turbulence with geometric repetition. A definite favourite of Dean Hubbell’s is the zigzag, or chevron, pattern. I appears as a leitmotif throughout many of Dean Hubbell’s series of painting.
Dean Hubbell likes to work in series and he handles the format like a virtuoso. The musical connotation of the latter term is intended in every way because within the context of the series each painting becomes different notes on the same theme, each contributing to the melodic whole. Another analogy is to film. The presentation of the series “Between Here and There” on Dean Hubbell’s website could almost be stills from a short, abstract movie in the tradition of, say, Stan Brahkhage. The series starts out with a strict chevron pattern against differently coloured backgrounds. After a few paintings, the pattern is upset and becomes looser and apparently more and more haphazard. Eventually the pattern is all but dissolved into a flurry of coarse brushstrokes and abstraction. The pattern appears again, but this time more angrily, almost brutally.
While each painting is completely spectacular on their own, I cannot stop replaying this series as a sequence in my head, and it is a trip!
Since we have opened the door to film, let us use some of its’ concepts to cast light upon another series.
The series “Almost a Portrait” consists of obfuscated figures. They can be identified as Native American from their ceremonial clothing and other traditional markers of Native identity. Dean Hubbell states that the paintings are based on traditional portraiture and how those practices were seldom “in the best interest of” Native American peoples. There is indeed something “off” about these images. This impression is further supported by their “bad framing”. The framing makes it appear as if these were pictures taken by accident, as when the shutter goes off in between changing camera position. French film theorists referred to such “badly” composed images as “decadrage” which roughly translates as “deframing”. Some New Wave filmmakers consciously used deframed images as a way to make the spectator aware of the frame and more generally to reflect upon the constructed nature of representation. It functions similarly in “Almost a Portrait”. By literally pushing subjects out of the frame, these images signal that proper representation is not to be found here and that the truth lies elsewhere. 
Patrick Dean Hubbell spent the whole of 2017 travelling around the Navajo Nation to collect earth pigment to use in his painting. Some of these paintings have been on displayed until recently at Peter’s Projects in Santa Fe.
As one of the most exciting contemporary artists, Kiva Gallery can’t wait to see what Patrick Dean Hubbell will do next. Kiva Gallery is also proud to include a number of Patrick Dean Hubbell’s paintings in its collection.
Like I’ve stated before here on the blog, Ryan Singer’s art is a glorious combination of 1980s era skateboard graphics, rock poster art, and comic books.
Recently, Singer has taken his pop cultural obsessions to the next level by fusing iconic Star Wars characters with traditional Navajo milieus. In Singer’s paintings, Tuba City becomes Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine and gigantic AT AT walkers can be seen marching through a wintery Shiprock, New Mexico. Somehow, the transformation manages to come off as completely logical. Ryan Singer can make the seemingly incompatible come together in a completely natural way. This is also the case in the paintings I want to put into focus today. 
One of Singer’s stylistic trademarks is his use of heavy outlines. Of course, strong outlines are a big part of the low brow/comic book aesthetic that Singer has adopted. But they are rarely associated with scenes of a more solemn and introspective character. That’s why I’ve been very taken with two of Singer’s paintings in Kiva Gallery’s collection. One is of an elderly woman staring out of the frame into the unknown. The fact that the viewer doesn’t see what she’s gazing at has the effect of turning the gaze inward rather than outward. Singer’s traditionally thick line work underscores this experience. There is much emotional content that can be read into the effect of the outline. The outline is so heavy it makes her seem anchored to the landscape. At the same time it closes the figure off and makes her appear isolated from her surroundings. The landscape behind her is simplified so that the woman pops out even more, which makes it impossible for the viewer to ignore her introspection. This is one of those rare paintings that instantly catapults the viewer into pondering the inner life of a figure that came into being solely through paint. Like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the viewer can’t help but wonder “what on earth could she be thinking about”. Yes, I just compared Ryan Singer to Leonardo Da Vinci. The comparison is apt but perhaps not adequate, because in a way the contemplation in front of Singer’s painting is more profound than Mona-Lisa’s. This is after all a Native woman so you know she’s seen some shit in her days. More than the smirk on the face of her more famous art historical relative would suggest.
Kiva Gallery also has another Ryan Singer painting with an unusually serene mood. It is a deceptively simple scene. But if you allow it, the outline will tell a deeper story about time and stasis, tradition and generational renewal. Again, it’s a painting of a woman in a landscape. In contrast to the woman above, this woman is young. Her activity, however, is old. She is spinning wool. The landscape around her seems to respond to her activity because it curves around the girl almost to envelope her. But there is that thick outline again, tracing the contours of the girl’s body and shielding her off from her surroundings. It is almost as if the landscape is moving more than she is. A strong outline reifies movement rather than capture it. In a way it stops movement and freezes it which makes the experience of superhero comics, which are of course full of movement, deliciously paradoxical. The girl spinning wool seems remarkably still despite being caught mid-motion. From the perspective of her activity, time has stopped moving. The girl probably learned how to spin wool from her mother, and she in turn will teach her daughter. The activity doesn’t belong to her, she belongs to the activity that has existed before her and will continue to exist long after she is gone.
I’m very grateful for these paintings and proud to have them grace the walls of Kiva Gallery. While they are completely representative of Ryan Singer’s painterly style, the quiet subject matter makes at least this viewer more attentive to the function of his artistic techniques and the stories they tell.
We’ve been doing some photography at Kiva Gallery in order to take stock of the gallery’s collection and put together and much needed database of quality images. Going through all the work in the gallery is a great opportunity to fall in love all over again with the art. We are letting the process take its time so we can study the paintings, sculptures and textiles up close. With the help of zoom lenses one can get into details on an almost microscopic level. You discover things that’s not available to the naked eye. Mateo Romero’s paintings have proven particularly rewarding to put through this process.
Mateo Romero’s recent focus on landscape is such a logical step considering his treatment of paint. That he takes landscape as motif is one thing, but with Romero you always get two paintings in one. Beyond the subject matter there is a dimension of pure paint that demands to be experienced on its own terms. And once you enter this dimension you go through what can only be described as the bliss of pure art.
Like modernism’s star theorist Clement Greenberg, Mateo Romero knows that painting a good story does not alone a good painting make. Of course, there is plenty of narrative content in a Romero. But there is also another side to Romero, one that sets its sights on abstraction. This is the side that would appeal to Greenberg because it is here that Romero indulges in the modernist imperative to explore what constitutes painting as an art form, i.e. the paint itself, and the power it holds to be a vehicle for emotion.
One can clearly see the importance Romero imparts to paint in “Girl with a Gun”. Aside from the 
figurative content, which is the expected source of suspense considering there is a gun involved, tension and drama is here conveyed primarily through paint. Unlike other paintings by Romero, there is a strict, almost dichotomous, protocol to the distribution of paint that tells it’s own wordless story. The totality of the background, or the field that surrounds the figure, is made up entirely of horizontal brushstrokes. This strict painterly scheme is however contrasted sharply by the formless spatter of paint spread across the center of the painting particularly and out toward the edges of the canvas. Control and abandonment here lives side by side and is through paint brought to bear upon the figurative content in a way that gives it added depth. The established tension tells of a threat of violent eruption that seems to belie the cool posture and demeanour of the girl holding the gun.
“Girl with a Gun” is a particularly dramatic example of Romero’s treatment of paint. There are other examples where paint is allowed to be equally expressive but more joyful and captivating. These kinds of brushstrokes are especially found in Romero’s Dancer series. More on that later. The photography sessions will continue and further excursions into Romero’s wonderful world of paint will be reported here.
Kiva Gallery loves Nicholas Galanin and thinks he is one of the most important figures in contemporary art, so we are excited to hear that Heard Museum will host a mid-career retrospective of his work. The exhibition will be titled ”Dear Listener” and run through May 04 to September 03, 2018. To my knowledge it will the biggest solo exhibition of Galanin’s work to date and will encompass more than 10,000 square feet of new and existing works by Galanin including video installation, sculpture, performance art, works on paper, installation work, and fashion.
“It’s strange to me how people always want me to be an “authentic Indian.” When I say I’m Haudenosaunee, they want me to look a certain way. Act a certain way. They’re disappointed when what they get is . . . just me. White-faced, red-haired. They spent hundreds of years trying to assimilate my ancestors, trying to create Indians who could blend in like me. But now they don’t want me either. I’m not Indian enough.”
“The Invisible Indians,” Shelby Lisk
The above is a quote from a new anthology titled #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women, by Charleyboy and Leatherdale, eds. I’ve only sampled sections from the book so far but it looks like a good and perhaps important read.
The book addresses the prejudices and expectations faced by native women, especially young women. Purposefully eclectic and sprawling, it tries to show the diversity and complexity of native female identity. It does so through form as well as content. Poetry here sits next to scholarly writing, illustrations and graphic design. The whole experience of the book seems to be perfectly in tune with digital identity. The anthology quotes from Twitter and one chapter adopts the layout of Instagram which should please a younger readership who is as much, perhaps more, at ease with social media than conventional books.
I’m definitely putting the book on my “to-read” list and you will probably see more about it here on the blog in the future.
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Star Wars franchise. What better way to celebrate than to show some examples of how Star Wars has appealed to Native artists.
Besides a notable similarity between traditional Hopi hairstyles and how Princess Leia wears her hair, as illustrated by Nicholas Galanin, Star Wars has little direct relevance to Native cultur
e. But of course Native peoples watch movies too. And the classic tale of good triumphing over evil seem to hold something different for everyone to identify with.
Navajo artist Ryan Singer, represented by Kiva Gallery, relies heavily on pop culture in his painting so it’s a small surprise that he has devoted a series of recent paintings to Star Wars. Singer explained the attraction in a radio interview:
The imaginary movie posters of Jeffrey Veregge has been featured on the blog before. Veregge depicts familiar Star Wars motifs and characters in the artistic style inherited from his Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe.
A few years back, Andy Everson did a series of Star Wars – themed paintings that had a political twist. In Everson’s hands, Star Wars battle of light and dark was referenced in order to address political concerns amongst his own tribe.
Steven Paul Judd specializes in “impossible” encounters of pop-cultural icons with Native American history. His photoshopped juxtapositions are often strikingly
funny but also remarkable for demonstrating a missed encounter and the exclusion of Native culture from mainstream pop culture.
Excluded or not, the above artists have all taken something they like and made it their own, even though the original content has no explicit relation to their culture whatsoever. I don’t want to read to much into this, but in a way I find the interest in Star Wars encouraging. It demonstrates a DIY approach to inclusion. Looking at these images I feel – If I may allow myself to partake in Star Wars geekiness and reference the revised subtitle of the very first Star Wars movie – A New Hope that Native culture may take a bigger slice of pop culture one day.
Post-colonialism is now a required course for most cultural studies programs. History is no longer taught solely from the perspective of the winners. But museums have been slow to adapt. While ancient Greek and Roman objects are clearly treated as art, many museums have been reticent to view Native American expressions of creativity as artwork rather than anthropological artifacts. Native American art have often been side-lined into special collections and museums, or even housed in Natural History Museums. In many places, the cultural heritage of Native Americans has institutionally been denied the label “art”.
Until now, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has operated under a similar discriminatory curatorial principle. Visitors looking to see Native American art have been disappointed to find it excluded from the museum’s American Wing, which is its rightful geographical context. Instead, one would find it lumped together with other indigenous art from Africa and Oceania. Last week the museum announced that this is about to change. For the first time in its 147-year history, Native American art will share space with recognized American masterpieces by, for instance, John Singer Sargent. The integration was made possible – both materially and conceptually – by a donation from the art collecting couple Charles and Valerie Diker who says “ We always felt that what we were collecting was American art. And we always felt very strongly that it should be shown in that context.”
The collection consists of 91 promised artworks from the Dikers. They will debut at the Met in an exhibition set to open 2018. According to Carrie Rebora Barratt, deputy director for collections and administration, the donation and exhibition “marks a turning point in the narratives presented within the American Wing.”
In lists of the “native-artists-you-should-know” kind, the name Nicholas Galanin features prominently. He is certainly no idler. He makes jewellery, he makes art in a variety of different media and he sings in a band called Silver Jackson. Having multiple functions does not mean he is unfocused. It just means he doesn’t do what’s expected. While attending art school, the teachers expected him to abandon his roots in the traditional imagery of his Alaskan Tlingit tribe to be more contemporary. He didn’t. Instead he put it into dialogue with contemporary times.
The unexpected is also a word that comes to mind when thinking of his art. Like a taxidermied polar bear or wolf suddenly losing its form and becoming a rug midway through.
In his art, some of Galanin’s key methods are comparison and juxtaposition. And, again, the results are quite often unexpected. As in “Things are Looking Native, Native’s Looking Whiter” (2012) in which Princess Leia from the “Star Wars” movies is juxtaposed with a Native American woman with traditional attire and hairstyle.
The meeting, or confrontation if you will, of traditional and contemporary can also be experienced in the two-part video Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan (2006), in which a Tlingit dancer does his thing to a contemporary soundtrack of wobbly dubstep, and a non-Native break-dancer interprets a Tlingit song. The result is so captivating that anyone questioning the relevance of traditional cultures for contemporary times gets food for thought.
As firm believers in the dialogue between tradition and contemporary, Kiva Gallery sympathizes wholeheartedly with Galanin’s artistic methods. Galanin shows that not only does this dialogue generate exciting visuals but also knowledge and insight.