ARS 494: Contemporary Indigenous Arts and Museum

When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California features contemporary art by First Californians and other American Indian artists with strong ties to the state. Spanning the past five decades, the exhibition includes more than sixty-five works in various media, from painting, sculpture, prints, and photography, to installation and video. More than forty artists are represented, among them pioneers such as Rick Bartow, George Blake, Dalbert Castro, Frank Day, Harry Fonseca, Frank LaPena, Jean LaMarr, James Luna, Karen Noble, Fritz Scholder, Brian Tripp, and Franklin Tuttle, as well as emerging and mid-career artists. Taking cues from their forebears, members of the younger generation often combine art and activism, embracing issues of identity, politics, and injustice to produce innovative--and frequently enlightening--work. The exhibition, along with the accompanying catalogue, transcends borders, with some California artists working outside the state, and several artists of non-California tribes living and creating within its boundaries. Diverse cultural influences coupled with the extraordinary dissemination of images made possible by technology have led to new forms of expression, making When I Remember I See Red a richly layered experience.   Published in association with the Crocker Art Museum   Exhibition dates: Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento: October 20, 2019-January 26, 2020 Institute of American Indian Arts, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe: August 14, 2020-January 3, 2021 Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles: July 18, 2021-February 27, 2022

Profiles over 1,000 Native American artists who are blazing new trails in the ancient arts.

Featuring work from the past decade by Jeffrey Gibson, one of America's most prominent contemporary artists, this monograph shows how he blends American Indian and Western cultural influences and explores issues of identity, alternative sub-cultures, post-colonialism, and marginalization. A citizen of the Mississippi Choctaw Nation and part Cherokee, Jeffrey Gibson spent time in Germany, England, and Korea in his youth. This mix of cultures informs much of his work, which combines elements from historical and contemporary Native arts and traditions, such as powwow regalia and the use of animal skins, with those from the artistic traditions of Modernism, Geometric Abstraction, and Minimalism. As a gay Native artist, Gibson explores in his work issues of oppression and civil rights in America, as well as universal ideas of love, community, strength, vulnerability, and survival. This magnificent volume focuses on nearly 60 works completed in the last decade, including culturally adorned punching bags, three-dimensional figurative works, text-based wall hangings, painted works on rawhide and canvas, and light and video works. Published in association with the Denver Art Museum

Shared Visions, from an exhibition prepared by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, presents the work of seventy Native American painters and sculptors. With fascinating essays by the exhibition organizers, Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, by Joy L. Gritton and W. Jackson Rushing, and more than 130 reproductions--seventy-six in color--Shared Visions is an excellent introduction to one of America's most important art movements.

Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is a unique contribution to the fields of visual culture, arts education, and American Indian studies. Written by scholars actively producing Native art resources, this book guides readers--students, educators, collectors, and the public--in how to learn about Indigenous cultures as visualized in our creative endeavors. By highlighting the rich resources and history of the Institute of American Indian Arts, the only tribal college in the nation devoted to the arts whose collections reflect the full tribal diversity of Turtle Island, these essays present a best-practices approach to understanding Indigenous art from a Native-centric point of view. Topics include biography, pedagogy, philosophy, poetry, coding, arts critique, curation, and writing about Indigenous art. Featuring two original poems, ten essays authored by senior scholars in the field of Indigenous art, nearly two hundred works of art, and twenty-four archival photographs from the IAIA's nearly sixty-year history, Making History offers an opportunity to engage the contemporary Native Arts movement.

No Reservation: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement presents the first history of this unknown, organic, highly diverse Native American art movement, based in New York City ? a movement that encompasses the founding of contemporary Native American film and theater in the United States as well as the strongest contemporary Native visual arts movement outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A distinctly Indigenous form of landscape representation is emerging among contemporary Indigenous artists from North America. For centuries, landscape painting in European art typically used representational strategies such as single-point perspective to lure viewers?and settlers?into the territories of the old and new worlds. In the twentieth century, abstract expressionism transformed painting to encompass something beyond the visual world, and, later, minimalism and the Land Art movement broadened the genre of landscape art to include sculptural forms and site-specific installations. In Shifting Grounds, art historian Kate Morris argues that Indigenous artists are expanding and reconceptualizing the forms of the genre, expressing Indigenous attitudes toward land and belonging even as they draw upon mainstream art practices. The resulting works evoke all five senses: from the overt sensuality of Kay WalkingStick?s tactile paintings to the eerie soundscapes of Alan Michelson?s videos to the immersive environments of Kent Monkman?s dioramas, this art resonates with a fully embodied and embedded subjectivity. Shifting Grounds explores themes of presence and absence, survival and vulnerability, memory and commemoration, and power and resistance, illuminating the artists? engagement not only with land and landscape but also with the history of representation itself.

Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star's lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist's singular vision. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts