When Marie Watt was creating Braid (2004), a spectacular wall hanging distinguished by a lopsided infinity sign made from geometric patches of cloth sewn onto brown blankets, she turned to friends and family for help. “I realized I could spend two years personally hand-stitching, or I could be creative about finishing in a timely manner,” she says. “That’s how the sewing circles evolved.” Over the past several years, Watt, whose lineage is part Seneca and part German-Scottish homesteader, has been making work that plays on the history and physical nature of blankets, an important cultural signpost in the relations between Indians and non-Indians and simultaneously a symbol of intimacy. Hung on the wall as abstract emblems, piled high into sculptures, or transformed into bronze and wood totem pole-like configurations, her blanket works evoke numerous and layered associations. “Community is a big part of my work. It is a family value, and I think it is fair to say it’s a tribal value,” says Watt. “I also like how it relates artistically to the teaching of Joseph Beuys, his notion of social sculpture.”
Watt’s informed embrace of divergent influences, both personal and art-historical, is characteristic of a rising generation of Native American artists. Whether they fuse pop-culture subjects with traditional techniques, fashion ceremonial forms from new and unexpected materials, or, like Watt, integrate cultural influences on a more conceptual level, Indian artists in their 20s, 30s, and 40s often rely on some form of hybrid artistic consciousness. “For many Native artists, tradition is not the antithesis of modernism, but its mulch,” writes critic Lucy Lippard in the catalogue for “Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art,” an exhibition organized last year by Albuquerque’s Tamarind Institute.
“Things have been moving fast in the field of contemporary Native arts over the last ten years or so, and the artists themselves have been moving around, too,” Lippard adds. As a result, she notes, younger Indian artists lean toward “syncretism, the bringing together of different influences from different cultures.” New educational opportunities – proliferating in recent decades as a career in the arts has increasingly been recognized as a path to financial self-sufficiency for Native Americans – have also brought a greater range of influences to bear on the work of artists of this generation.
These younger artists are catching the attention of gallerists, collectors, and museum professionals like Kathleen Ash Milby, assistant curator at the George Gustav Heye Center. She says that the museum, the New York branch of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, has been amplifying its mission to “become known as a place that is shaping cutting-edge Native work,” because of its proximity to the hub of the contemporary art world. She points to shows like “Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination,” which she curated, on view through September 3, and the upcoming “Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World,” an exhibition of 15 younger Indian artists scheduled to open at Phoenix’s Heard Museum in October before traveling to the Heye Center next spring.
Curators at mainstream venues are also embracing work by these artists. Last fall the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, hosted “No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art,” featuring Indian and non-Indian artists, including Watt. “I was starting to see really interesting new work that was complicated and nuanced,” says Aldrich curator Richard Klein. “Native Americans have long grappled with a sense of the destabilization of the world they know,” he points out, “so their work resonates at a time of widespread insecurity about issues like immigration and globalization.”
At the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, Twig Johnson, curator of Native American art, has commissioned pieces ranging from beaded high-top sneakers by Kiowa artist Teri Greeves to a war shirt by Cheyenne filmmaker Bentley Spang made from snapshots of ancestral lands. And a team of curators at New York’s Museum of Arts & Design organized “Changing Hands,” a multipart exhibition of contemporary American Indian art loosely based on traditional functional and ceremonial designs (at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center through September 16). Much of what we consider historical American Indian art started out as everyday objects, which were later made with an eye to non-Native consumption. Since distinctions between high and low and art and craft are largely absent from this history, the objects that derive from these traditions provide rich fodder for those interested in breaking down such boundaries.
Virgil Ortiz still lives part-time on the Cochiti reservation near Santa Fe, where his family has been making ceramics for generations. His clay figures and vessels are clear descendants of the Cochiti style, but they often have a sexy, gender-bending edge that places him among a new wave of innovators called “Free Spirit” potters by ceramics historian and gallerist Garth Clark, who represents Oltiz in New York. The globe-trotting artist also designs textiles. For Donna Karan he created stylized versions of the black-and-white patterns of Cochiti pottery. For his own clothing line, La Mode Indigene, he makes hip leather-inflected, Plains Indian-style pieces. Ortiz has even crafted a full-size leather-and-metal outfit for a model horse, which was included in a solo exhibition last summer at the Heye Center.
His ceramics’ clean, elegant, bold lines define stylized plant forms, urban Celtic-style tattoo designs, and rakish figure drawings. By taking up subjects and stylistic motifs that hint at Art Nouveau or Pop and integrating them with the bold Cochiti sensibility, Ortiz reverses the process by which mainstream artists have adopted designs from unnamed Indian sources. His midsize pots and figures sold for between $4,000 and $7,000 at “Renegade Clay,” a show in March at King Galleries of Scottsdale in Arizona.
Annie Pootoogook comes from a family of women artists who have depicted Inuit life in a sometimes droll fashion ever since Pootoogook’s grandmother drew a satiric picture of a tourist taking a photograph of an Eskimo. The artist canies on this tradition in spare yet colorful pencil-and-crayon drawings, but now her subjects include a family watching Bart Simpson on TV and a man bemoaning his inability to pay the electric bill. With the resurgence of interest in narrative drawing, Pootoogook has the advantage of having been steeped in the tradition of Inuit storytelling drawing, a technique that developed early in the 20th century to record picturesque and vanishing customs.
Pootoogook, who is represented by Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto, had a solo exhibition last summer at The Power Plant, the first time an Inuit artist showed at Toronto’s most prominent public contemporary art space. Last fall she won Canada’s Sobey Art Award, a $50,000 prize given annually to artists under 40.
In his shape-shifting works, Brian Jungen, who is of mixed Swiss and Dane-zaa heritage, has carved baseball bats to look like totem poles, torn softballs apart to create skull forms, and reconfigured plastic lawn chairs into huge hanging skeletons that would seem at home in natural-history museums. His Pop-conceptual work refers simultaneously to the handmade and the manufactured, to traditional artifacts as well as modern ones, to the local and the global.
Jungen’s “Prototypes for New Understanding” series presented red, black, and white Nike Air Jordan sneakers broken apart and transformed into fierce-looking objects resembling Northwest Coast ceremonial masks. The Vancouver-based artist, whose most recent solo museum show was at Rotterdam’s Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, last winter, explains that these pieces explore the way sporting events have taken on many of the trappings of traditional ceremonies such as spectatorship, enacted rivalry, and costume. Jungen is represented by Casey Kaplan in New York and Catriona Jeffries in Vancouver.
Glass is not a traditional medium in Native cultures, but it has been used to stunning effect by contemporary artists. Joe Fedderson, a Colville Confederated Tribes artist who shows at Froelick Gallery in Portland, Oregon, began working in glass several years ago. Revealing understated wit, he creates blackon-white basket-shaped vessels with linear patterns that appear to be traditional but are, in fact, diagrammatic designs of things like tire treads, parking spaces, and cinder-block walls.
Preston Singletary, who shows with Heller Gallery in New York and William Traver Gallery in Seattle, models his glass sculptures on Northwest Coast ceremonial objects, such as the Tlingit semiconical hat, bird-shaped rattles, and cedar gift boxes. Critic Matthew Kangas has called these sources “the ultimate readymades.” Singletary adapts these forms to glass, subtly streamlining the traditional “formline” ornamentation.
Tlingit artist Nicholas Galanin of Sitka, Alaska, has used tribal masks as well as his own face as the starting points for his “What Have We Become” series. After being scanned into a computer, the shapes are laser-cut from reams of paper printed with such texts as the Bible and Under Mount Saint Elias, an early anthropological study of the Tlingit. Deeply aware of how his culture is seen from the outside, Galanin has also made bracelets with serial numbers covering their designs, simulating the “museum graffiti” of the disfiguring numbering systems used on artifacts in ethnographic museums. His work has been included in the “No Reservations” and “Changing Hands” exhibitions.
Galanin’s training illustrates the variety of educational opportunities available to young Native artists. Beginning on a traditional path, he apprenticed in Tlingit jewelry making with his father and uncle, then studied silversmithing and jewelry design at London Guildhall University. He recently finished a master’s degree in indigenous visual arts from Massey University in New Zealand, where he met Maori contemporary artists, whom he admires as “leading the way as indigenous artists in handling change.”
The opportunities for such cross-cultural learning have increased since the founding in 1962 of Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, which broke ground with its ecumenical approach to teaching Native arts from across North America.
Recent decades have seen institutions and foundations set up specifically to teach and fund Indians, as well as an increase in access to mainstream art schools, sometimes through direct tribal support.
Watt followed a mixed educational path, completing her M.F.A. at Yale University after attending Oregon’s liberal-arts Willamette University and the IAIA. Before securing an upcoming residency at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, she completed a residency at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Pendleton, Oregon. There Native artists work with a master printmaker and are coached in the business side of art. Watt also received a fellowship from Indianapolis’s Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art – a biennial $20,000 grant for Native American artists that comes with an exhibition, a catalogue, and the museum’s acquisition of a work for its permanent collection. “There is a lot of legwork in getting a good education,” says Watt, who is represented by Portland’s PDX Contemporary Art. “I think of this as including learning from artists in one’s family.”
Another Eiteljorg fellowship recipient is Montreal-based artist Nadia Myre, who is interested in symbols and codes, from Morse code and flags to tattooing and scarification. The artist, who is of Algonquin heritage, combines the languages of Minimalism and Native traditions in her multidisciplinary work, which will be included in the upcoming “Remix” exhibition. She created the stark, abstract white-on-red panels of Indian Act (2003) by beading over the 56 pages of Canada’s 1876 Indian Act with the colors of the nation’s flag. Like Watt, Myre enlisted the help of volunteers and friends to complete her ambitious project. Art M�r gallery in Montreal, which represents Myre, sells individual pages of Indian Act for $3,100 and larger sculptures for up to $25,000.
Painter Jeffrey Gibson offers a sophisticated evocation of movement and place in his abstractions. The New York-based artist, of Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry, graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied painting and critical theory ("always in different semesters,” he jokes), and went on to get his master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in London in 1998.
Gibson’s lush, almost steamy abstract works have been called “Helen Frankenthaler on acid” by Cate McQuaid in the Boston Globe. The paintings, which seem to pulsate with color, also recall the work of Martin Johnson Heade, Chris Ofili, and Australian aboriginal painting. Among his influences, Gibson cites powwows and their urban counterparts – nightclubs and rave culture – which are distinguished by the importance of dance regalia and constant movement. The artist, who sometimes festoons his paintings with strings of beads and clumps of gooey, earthlike material, says that a highlight of his London education was learning about the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who built up a persona with his flamboyant nightclub appearances.
Gibson exemplifies the way this new generation of Native artists has managed to carve out a middle ground between honoring their heritage and creating art that functions in any context. A recipient of a Creative Capital grant, he is represented by Samson Projects in Boston (where his paintings sell for between $2,200 and $16,000). But he welcomes opportunities to show in the context of Native art. In addition to having work included in the “No Reservations” and “Off the Map” exhibitions, he had a solo show at New York’s American Indian Community House in 2005. Even with his extensive knowledge of art history, he finds that “Native art is still the most stimulating work to look at.” And although much of his output shows no direct sign of Native technique or content, he nevertheless sees it as the product of a community. He is quick to credit the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who paid for his M.F.A. studies in London. “My community has supported me,” Gibson says. “My chief felt that me going there, being a strong artist, made him stronger.”