Native Peoples / January-February 2014 / Art by Any Other Name

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Art by Any Other Name

Native cultures and artists continuously adapt and overcome challenges to both thrive in the modern world and remain true to their ancestral roots

Try to nail down an easy definition for the term “graphic arts” and see how far you get. What we can say is that graphic art is two-dimensional creative expression in a wide variety of mediums that are often, though not always, technology based. From Egyptian hieroglyphics of 4,500 years ago to today’s Web designers—and with a world of modalities in between—graphic art can encompass just about any fine-art form for which there is no easy categorization. It’s a slippery term that can strike a nerve with some of the most seasoned artists.

Whatever you care to call it, modern culture is the conduit of the graphic artist, and this is no less true for Native graphic artists as it is for their non-Native contemporaries. Culture is, after all, something that exists on a temporal continuum, never completely frozen in time. And Native cultures, like the world around them, are always changing and adapting to their circumstances in a delicate dance to simultaneously thrive in the modern world while staying true to their ancestral roots.

Here we explore four artists whose work fits loosely into the genre we ambivalently call graphic arts. All are exceedingly accomplished, their art embodies the modern reflection of traditional aesthetics, and their excellence has been widely recognized in the Indian art world.

Jacob Meders

If there’s one thing that drives most Native artists crazy, it’s the way Indians have been portrayed in mainstream historical narratives. Jacob Meders (Mechoopda Maidu) has built his art career around countering problematic representations that perpetuate myths, like the “vanishing Indian,” that other artists—most notoriously Edward S. Curtis—built their careers on.

“I’m a history geek,” Meders declares. “There’s this linear approach to documenting our people, versus who we really are. I’ve always been really skeptical about the information I would find [in research about my tribe], especially when the source was some anthropologist or historian who didn’t have a whole lot of connection with our tribe,” he laments.

The famous but often inaccurate images by Curtis are nonetheless distinctive for their photographic style and characteristic sepia tones. The technique is known as photogravure; it’s an archaic but highly complex process of intaglio (or photomechanical) printmaking rarely practiced anymore. Meders has adopted it as a way to reconstruct historical misperceptions through an authentic Native perspective, reflective of the way Maidu people interact with the modern world. In another old and painstakingly laborious method of printmaking known as collotype (it was the first technology for mass-produced mechanical printing, invented in 1856), he utilizes well-known old collotypes reworked by introducing plastic toy Indians into the images. The effect is an indigenization, through the subtle use of humor, of what otherwise is an image depicting dominant Western culture. It symbolically, if not literally, inserts Indians into a historical narrative from which they traditionally have been excluded.

Working in other mediums such as encaustic painting, lithography and serigraphy, Meders was formally trained as a printmaker, holding a bachelor’s degree in printmaking from Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia and a master of fine arts from Arizona State University. But call him a graphic artist and he bristles. “It’s a little disturbing to be called a graphic artist—I’d rather be called an artist. What I do is not so easily summed up, kind of like being Native,” he says.

Meders’ exhibits include Divided Lines at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe; Agents of Change: An Exhibition of Artist’ Books with a Social Conscience in Gallery 31 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Something Old, Something New, Nothing Borrowed: Recent Acquisitions from the Heard Museum Collection; Illustrious at the Heard Museum North Scottsdale; and Transcending Traditions: Contemporary American Indian Artwork at Mesa Contemporary Arts in Mesa, Arizona. His work is collected by major universities and other institutions in the United States and internationally. Meders is currently represented at the Berlin Gallery of the Heard Museum and can be reached at jmeders@yahoo.com or 912/660-1626.

Randy Kemp

To the non-artist layperson, a graphic artist is likely someone who does graphic design specifically for commercial application. For Randy Kemp (Choctaw/Euchee-Muscogee Creek), this would be partly true. He is by day a commercial graphic artist with the official title of Senior Environmental Graphic Designer at Arizona State University in Tempe. But beyond his job at ASU, Kemp is an artist’s artist in every sense, whose talents range from visual arts on one end of the creative spectrum to music and acting on the other. Not confining his art to only weekends or a part-time hobby, though, Kemp characterizes it as a never-ending process: “It’s really a full-time job. I’m thinking about it all the time, and it’s a problem-solving issue [where I’m] going through dimensions, colors, layouts, designs … all these different cues I have to think about before I get to the actual component. I’m an artist first. I’m always looking for ways to use the voice of creativity, and, frankly, it’s about supporting our Indian people and what we’re up against,” he declares with conviction.

Professionally, Kemp’s art career was launched in about 1979 when he was a student at Bacone College in Muscogee, Oklahoma, studying under the leadership of prominent American Indian artists W. Richard West Sr., Solomon McCombs and Ruthe Blalock Jones. He later attended ASU and earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting. His first award came in 1984, when he won best of show in a student-art competition at the Heard Museum. Kemp muses that his career really began on a wall of his childhood home in the Bell Gardens community of East Los Angeles. “My older brother drew things on the wall, and I enhanced his drawings with shading and lighting … I had a really good start because it was like a home art school,” he says.

Kemp’s art résumé is as impressive as they come. Some highlights include a 10-foot replica of a Fender Stratocaster guitar he designed and painted for Casino Arizona on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community; “Radio Healer,” a performance work/project with flute and computer-generated audio (see www.radiohealer.com); Sonata del Sol, a music and poetry program for palliative-care patients at Mayo Clinic Hospital; and a wall mural titled “Morning Star,” created for the Native American Connections program with volunteers of the Make a Difference Foundation in the greater Phoenix area.

Kemp is not currently showing in galleries, but he can be reached at randy.kemp@asu.edu or 602/779-7716.

Douglas Miles

It’s the quintessential summer Southern California day—perfect for painting a mural in the mean streets of East Los Angeles. Douglas Miles (San Carlos Apache/Akimel O’odham) has been commissioned by Self-Help Graphics and Art, an L.A. nonprofit institution dedicated to the promotion of visual and multimedia art, to beautify their building, street-style. He is also the curator of their current exhibit, titled What TRIBE, which is an unflinching examination of the way negative stereotypes of Native Americans are perpetuated in media and popular culture. He dutifully works as we talk, spray can in hand, anxious to get back home to Phoenix.

“I sold my first painting 20 or 25 years ago after my parents encouraged me to do shows. I didn’t have the confidence it took; I was raising kids and working. But I always painted and drew as a kid,” Miles mused. As he morphed out of a career as a social worker and into his career as an artist, the transition was not without its connections. “Art is always a way for people to express and identify themselves. It is a form of communication; social work is a microcosm, and art is a macrocosm. But I don’t want to demand viewer understanding of my work,” he says thoughtfully. “I want them to have their own understanding.”

Miles draws directly on images inherent in Apache culture that inevitably invoke the warrior, graffiti-style. His style is raw and gritty, and he frequently utilizes images of Geronimo and other Apache warriors in ways that are a stark reminder of the violence of the past and present. It’s a street-wise, urban sensibility that appeals to a new generation of Native kids, kids who have adopted skateboarding not only as a sport, but also as a subculture, and have blended it with their own Native identities. Out of this Miles birthed Apache Skateboards, a skateboard company and team that has brought skater consciousness to Native events like the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Gathering of Nations Powwow in Albuquerque.

Miles is mastering artistic diversity by also working in other mediums, like film and photography, and his accomplishments are too numerous to list. Most recently, Miles’ work was part of the Heard Museum’s highly acclaimed 2012 exhibit Beyond Geronimo: The Apache Experience. His work can be found at www.apacheskateboards.com or by contacting him at 928/200-8145.

Thomas “Breeze” Marcus

As I approach Self-Help Graphics’ half-painted building, “Breeze” Marcus (Tohono O’odham) is on the top rung of a ladder working on his section of the mural, which is an explosion of color and intricately woven, maze-like line drawings vaguely reminiscent of O’odham basket designs. He is a collaborative partner with Doug Miles in the mural project, the fourth such large scale-art collaboration that the two have done together in their 15-year-long acquaintance. Marcus is many years Miles’ junior, but both are experienced street/mural artists and they work together seamlessly.

Marcus is candid about his beginnings as a graffiti artist in his adolescence. When he was growing up in Phoenix and the nearby Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, tagging was a way of life that wasn’t without its trouble. Run-ins with the law exposed him to the dark underbelly of racism. He speaks at length about how graffiti responds to the repressive elements of society, especially as it relates to poverty. Eventually, his work evolved into a more mature and refined way of expressing himself artistically. He stresses the importance of being a good role model for the kids he works with in a youth program at Salt River: “We have to inspire kids in a good way” he says.

Bringing inspiration and beauty to poor communities is what Marcus does. In 2013, he and Miles were invited to New Orleans, where they completed wall-art projects at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival’s Native American Village and in the hurricane-torn and abandoned section of the Upper Ninth Ward. In addition to the mural projects, the traveling What TRIBE exhibit was showcased in the Treme neighborhood. The Heard Museum has also been the beneficiary of Marcus’ endeavors, with a 2013 indoor mural project that brought in the participation of Salt River youth in what’s been called a “paint-by-numbers” community approach. Marcus and Jeff Slim were the project designers, under the leadership of Heard Museum Director of Education Jaclyn Roessel.

Marcus is currently represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe; www.blueraingallery.com. He can be reached via email at breezephx@gmail.com.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville) is a veteran artist who has shown her work and captured two dozen top awards at shows such as the Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, the Eiteljorg Indian Market and Festival, the Red Earth Festival and others, over a decade-long career. She is currently a research associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a freelance journalist.