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Earlier this month, the newly launched Native Arts and Cultures Foundation held its first board meeting in Portland. While still in its nascent stages, the permanently endowed national foundation, the first of its kind, will be dedicated to supporting the arts in the American Indian, Alaska native and native Hawaiian communities.
As board chairman Walter Echo-Hawk noted:
A foundation of this nature will help reverse the long history of government suppression of Native culture done as part of the United States' assimilation program. Through gifts of this nature, Indian Country can direct its resources to protect what is closest to home to all Indian tribes—our own cultures.
But how do you define native art?
That's a question the Portland-based foundation and many native artists are still grappling with. Pendleton artist James Lavadour, who lives on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, prefers to define himself within the mainstream of the art world, calling his work "contemporary art. period." Meanwhile, others, like Lillian Pitt, a sculptor and artist who hails from the Warm Springs/Wasco and Yakama tribes, more explicitly draw on traditional themes in their work. Pitt's website, for instance, prominently labels her as a "Pacific Northwest Native American Artist."
So what's the future for native arts? What themes and trends are shaping the current conversation within the native artistic community? How do traditional art and practices inform the contemporary scene? What disciplines should be included under the rubric of native art?
GUESTS:
- Elizabeth Woody: Board secretary of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and founding board member of Soapstone, a women's writing retreat on the Oregon Coast
- James Lavadour: Artist and founder of Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts in Pendleton
- Wendy Red Star: Conceptual Crow Indian artist and adjunct art professor at Portland State University
- Bud Lane: Traditional native artist, language and traditional arts instructor for the Siletz tribe and tribal council vice chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians
Photo credit: Wendy Red Star
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I am at work and can only sort of hear the program, but there have been a few bits coming through about language, so I wanted to at least post this link.
http://cs.sou.edu/~harveyd/acorns/
Glenn
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i'm always curious about who gets to be "native." does this reflect a specific immersion in a Native American culture as one is growing up, then applying that clearly to one's art? is it more about having some Native American blood in the bloodline --- with or without reflecting tribal beliefs, traditions, or artwork in one's work?
i also wonder when "native" starts and ends, given the seemingly neverending evils (inevitabilities?) of colonialism. at some point, this continent was not peopled by what we would now call "Native Americans."
like half of white America, i am part Cherokee. i didn't grow up with many/any traditions, except a few my aunt heard about from her grandmother. we included our own take on some Tsalagi and other native contemporary wedding traditions in our recent wedding. is that OK? do i get to be "native?" my artwork is deeply involved with ancestry and legacy at the moment, and intersects with the Polynesian "natives" of Easter Island (descendants of Polynesian explorer-colonialists of the 5th century A.D.). I AM CONFUSED!
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I think that both traditional forms and contemporary art by native artists should qualify, unless your culture is a dead thing to be preserved instead of something living that grows, changes and adapts to the world it lives in. The fact that a piece of art does not conform to specific rules does not meant that it is not informed and shaped bt them.
The important thing is to define your philosophy and the spirit of what you are trying to accomplish. Then you set the rules based on that philosophy. If you have the spirit, when you are confronted by exceptions to the rules, you devise you can decide on a case by case basis whether to make an exception or not, or to actually change the rule.
A story from the building of the Portland Classical Chinese Garden: When the Chinese designers selected American magnolias as foundation plants, the head gardener objected because they were not chinese trees. They said essentially, "If these trees had been growing in China during the Ming dynasty, we would have put them in our gardens."
An artist captures the essence of a concept, not just the rules that constrain it.