Post by hushasha40 on Apr 8, 2007 12:36:42 GMT 1
'New Skins' sheds traditional Indian expectations
Minnesota painters Jim Denomie and Andrea Carlson mine their Ojibwe heritage for contemporary gold.
By Mary Abbe, Minneapolis Star Tribune
April 6, 2007
Being an American Indian can saddle an artist with a lot of baggage, most of it someone else's.
Some expect Indian art to be full of images of eagles, feathers, buffalo, mountain vistas, sunsets and gnarled elders wrapped in blankets and looking noble, resigned or both.
While many artists are happy to fulfill such expectations, Minnesotans Jim Denomie and Andrea Carlson are not among them. Both mine their Ojibwe heritage for inspiration and imagery, but have little patience with the clichés that litter the landscape of Indian culture.
Their paintings, in very different styles, are paired in "New Skins," opening today at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
"May is Indian month so I get a lot of offers to speak," said Denomie, a member of Wisconsin's Lac Courte Oreilles band. "I always ask, 'Do you know my art?' And when they see it, they usually say, 'Oh, no, that's not what we had in mind at all.' "A lot of conversations get pulled into romantic ideas of native identity," Carlson said. "It's something that's brought to the work that makes all of us go, 'ugh.' I would love to do those velvet paintings with eagles coming out of peace pipes because it's so fun to mess with people, but ... I really like artistic sovereignty and the ability to do what I want."
Growing up brown
Denomie, 51, who grew up as "a brown American" in south Minneapolis, injects a comic tone into his art.
A graduate of the University of Minnesota, where his work has been shown at the Weisman Art Museum, Denomie (pronounced DEN-oh-me) often gives an ironic spin to Minnesota's Indian history. One large painting depicts Fort Snelling as a White Castle restaurant surrounded by vignettes from native history, including forced marches in the 1860s, abusive priests and a more recent incident in which an Indian was stuffed into the trunk of a police car.
Despite the seriousness of the subjects, Denomie doesn't pontificate or hector. He ridicules. In Denomie's nothing-sacred landscape, an Indian can be spotted mooning the governor, a horse from Picasso's "Guernica" screams and an Indian couple pose like the farmers in "American Gothic."My work combines my Ojibwe heritage and storytelling with my mainstream art education," said Denomie. He's often felt "this expectation that I do native American imagery, which means buffalo and tepees, but I grew up in Minneapolis and couldn't relate to them. So I do represent my heritage, but not in the way people prefer."
In "Peking Duck," Denomie depicts a native riding in a rickshaw pulled by a coolie flying above a lake while Indian figures exchange a drum in the clouds. Merrily romping through art history, the painting parodies Michelangelo's creation-of-man image on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and mocks anthropologists' theories that the Americas were settled by Asians who crossed a land bridge it the Bering Strait.
"This is saying we crossed the Bering Strait, but it was to get take-out, because we just love Chinese food," Denomie said.
His part of the show will be dominated by about 125 small paintings from 2005, when he set out to complete at least one painting a day. He and his wife, Diane Wilson, a writer who is associate director of Franconia Sculpture Park, live in a log-cabin style home near Taylors Falls, Minn. By day he is a construction worker, which means it is often near midnight when he heads for his painting studio. Still, by the end of the year he had finished 430 paintings, ranging from colorful portraits of doleful Indians sporting single feathers in their headbands to expressive little abstractions and comic images of birds and animals.
Coming out culturally mixed
Carlson, 27, is a Nebraska-born painter of Ojibwe-French-Scandinavian heritage who is equally at home in each of her cultures. Her paintings are surrealistic fusions of Ojibwe and Euro-American imagery. In a self-conscious nod to her Indian roots, she has even painted four images on beaver pelts that are stretched in large wooden hoops reminiscent of giant snowshoes.
"I'm part of that generation that is reclaiming a lot of [Indian] heritage and tradition," said Carlson, who attended a Christian boarding school as a child before graduating from the University of Minnesota and completing a master's degree at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2005. In art school she sometimes encountered people who insisted that if she were truly an Indian artist she should paint on buckskin, an idea she thought was "ridiculous."I was born in 1979, and there was tennis available from my birth," Carlson said. "This is the world we live in. We have some perspective [on Ojibwe traditions], but we also watch MTV."
For the Art Institute show, she appropriated 10 items from the museum's collection -- including the famous "jade mountain," a painting of an Asian rug bazaar, a Victorian-era plate depicting Fort Snelling, and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner -- and painted them surrounded by creatures from Ojibwe legends and tales. Many of the tales concern Naniboujou, a trickster known for changing his shape, his sex and his identity as well as for indulging in bawdy behavior.
In Carlson's paintings, the museum's treasures are liberated from their historical context and float into a "mythic landscape" of her invention, a place where every object from any era or culture can mutate and merge with something from another time or place.
The actual Victorian-era plate, for example, depicts a militaristic eagle brandishing claws full of arrows over Fort Snelling in a bizarre merger of Indian and official U.S. government symbolism. In Carlson's painting, a frieze of nude warriors surrounds the plate along with dragon-like monsters from Naniboujou's world.
"I love Naniboujou because he's just a goofball, always playing with who he is and what he does," said Carlson. "I love that fluidity of identity because we're always becoming and not being; we're never static."
Copyright 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
www.startribune.com
What: Paintings with contemporary Ojibwe themes by Minnesotans Andrea Carlson and Jim Denomie.
When:Today through May 27.
Where: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Av. S.
Review: Carlson's elegantly linear and surrealistic paintings fuse characters from Ojibwe tales with images of objects from the museum's collection, while Denomie uses wonderfully expressive brushwork and brooding color in portraiture and comic scenes.
Free Talks: 7 p.m. Thursday, Carlson. 7 p.m. April 26, both artists with critic Ann Klefstad. 7 p.m. May 10, Denomie.
Tickets: Free. 612-870-3131 or www.artsmia.org.
Minnesota painters Jim Denomie and Andrea Carlson mine their Ojibwe heritage for contemporary gold.
By Mary Abbe, Minneapolis Star Tribune
April 6, 2007
Being an American Indian can saddle an artist with a lot of baggage, most of it someone else's.
Some expect Indian art to be full of images of eagles, feathers, buffalo, mountain vistas, sunsets and gnarled elders wrapped in blankets and looking noble, resigned or both.
While many artists are happy to fulfill such expectations, Minnesotans Jim Denomie and Andrea Carlson are not among them. Both mine their Ojibwe heritage for inspiration and imagery, but have little patience with the clichés that litter the landscape of Indian culture.
Their paintings, in very different styles, are paired in "New Skins," opening today at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
"May is Indian month so I get a lot of offers to speak," said Denomie, a member of Wisconsin's Lac Courte Oreilles band. "I always ask, 'Do you know my art?' And when they see it, they usually say, 'Oh, no, that's not what we had in mind at all.' "A lot of conversations get pulled into romantic ideas of native identity," Carlson said. "It's something that's brought to the work that makes all of us go, 'ugh.' I would love to do those velvet paintings with eagles coming out of peace pipes because it's so fun to mess with people, but ... I really like artistic sovereignty and the ability to do what I want."
Growing up brown
Denomie, 51, who grew up as "a brown American" in south Minneapolis, injects a comic tone into his art.
A graduate of the University of Minnesota, where his work has been shown at the Weisman Art Museum, Denomie (pronounced DEN-oh-me) often gives an ironic spin to Minnesota's Indian history. One large painting depicts Fort Snelling as a White Castle restaurant surrounded by vignettes from native history, including forced marches in the 1860s, abusive priests and a more recent incident in which an Indian was stuffed into the trunk of a police car.
Despite the seriousness of the subjects, Denomie doesn't pontificate or hector. He ridicules. In Denomie's nothing-sacred landscape, an Indian can be spotted mooning the governor, a horse from Picasso's "Guernica" screams and an Indian couple pose like the farmers in "American Gothic."My work combines my Ojibwe heritage and storytelling with my mainstream art education," said Denomie. He's often felt "this expectation that I do native American imagery, which means buffalo and tepees, but I grew up in Minneapolis and couldn't relate to them. So I do represent my heritage, but not in the way people prefer."
In "Peking Duck," Denomie depicts a native riding in a rickshaw pulled by a coolie flying above a lake while Indian figures exchange a drum in the clouds. Merrily romping through art history, the painting parodies Michelangelo's creation-of-man image on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and mocks anthropologists' theories that the Americas were settled by Asians who crossed a land bridge it the Bering Strait.
"This is saying we crossed the Bering Strait, but it was to get take-out, because we just love Chinese food," Denomie said.
His part of the show will be dominated by about 125 small paintings from 2005, when he set out to complete at least one painting a day. He and his wife, Diane Wilson, a writer who is associate director of Franconia Sculpture Park, live in a log-cabin style home near Taylors Falls, Minn. By day he is a construction worker, which means it is often near midnight when he heads for his painting studio. Still, by the end of the year he had finished 430 paintings, ranging from colorful portraits of doleful Indians sporting single feathers in their headbands to expressive little abstractions and comic images of birds and animals.
Coming out culturally mixed
Carlson, 27, is a Nebraska-born painter of Ojibwe-French-Scandinavian heritage who is equally at home in each of her cultures. Her paintings are surrealistic fusions of Ojibwe and Euro-American imagery. In a self-conscious nod to her Indian roots, she has even painted four images on beaver pelts that are stretched in large wooden hoops reminiscent of giant snowshoes.
"I'm part of that generation that is reclaiming a lot of [Indian] heritage and tradition," said Carlson, who attended a Christian boarding school as a child before graduating from the University of Minnesota and completing a master's degree at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2005. In art school she sometimes encountered people who insisted that if she were truly an Indian artist she should paint on buckskin, an idea she thought was "ridiculous."I was born in 1979, and there was tennis available from my birth," Carlson said. "This is the world we live in. We have some perspective [on Ojibwe traditions], but we also watch MTV."
For the Art Institute show, she appropriated 10 items from the museum's collection -- including the famous "jade mountain," a painting of an Asian rug bazaar, a Victorian-era plate depicting Fort Snelling, and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner -- and painted them surrounded by creatures from Ojibwe legends and tales. Many of the tales concern Naniboujou, a trickster known for changing his shape, his sex and his identity as well as for indulging in bawdy behavior.
In Carlson's paintings, the museum's treasures are liberated from their historical context and float into a "mythic landscape" of her invention, a place where every object from any era or culture can mutate and merge with something from another time or place.
The actual Victorian-era plate, for example, depicts a militaristic eagle brandishing claws full of arrows over Fort Snelling in a bizarre merger of Indian and official U.S. government symbolism. In Carlson's painting, a frieze of nude warriors surrounds the plate along with dragon-like monsters from Naniboujou's world.
"I love Naniboujou because he's just a goofball, always playing with who he is and what he does," said Carlson. "I love that fluidity of identity because we're always becoming and not being; we're never static."
Copyright 2007 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
www.startribune.com
What: Paintings with contemporary Ojibwe themes by Minnesotans Andrea Carlson and Jim Denomie.
When:Today through May 27.
Where: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Av. S.
Review: Carlson's elegantly linear and surrealistic paintings fuse characters from Ojibwe tales with images of objects from the museum's collection, while Denomie uses wonderfully expressive brushwork and brooding color in portraiture and comic scenes.
Free Talks: 7 p.m. Thursday, Carlson. 7 p.m. April 26, both artists with critic Ann Klefstad. 7 p.m. May 10, Denomie.
Tickets: Free. 612-870-3131 or www.artsmia.org.