How Larry McNeil & Frank Janzen made the lithographs for the Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art Project

At its essence, I suspect that photography is simply about noticing stuff that other people don't.

Writing how-to essays are pretty low on my list of things to write about, akin to a trip to the dentist, likely because of all the time spent with students describing and discussing process. I'd much rather write about the creative end of being an artist, where magic & the unexpected reside. On the other hand, process has so much to do with informing content that I thought perhaps I should break with my usual protocols and write about how this collaborative process with Frank Janzen, the Master Printer at the Crow's Shadow unfolded. Frank and I had a mutual esteem for well-told stories, the struggle for good art, Guinness Beer, good food and travel, so we got along well from the moment we first met. We also had a mutual work ethic with the creative process that involved a somewhat blue-collar attitude of showing up early, working hard all day and going home exhausted but content with our day's work. Followed by an occasional beer, because after all, we're not fanatics. I think.

Last week I did an interview about Migrations from here in Idaho with good friend Joan O'Beirne at Keene College in New Hampshire via Skype, the online phone and video service. It was a first for both of us and we pretended we knew what we were doing and just pressed a bunch of buttons until we got it to work. The sound component was easy, but the video would keep arbitrarily appearing and disappearing and we'd keep asking whether we could see each other yet. My teenager would have rolled his eyes and laughed at our bumbling ways, but us two university scholars finally put our superior intellect together and quite accidentally finally got it to work. You should have seen us beaming at each other when each of our faces appeared on each other's screens in all of our glory. On her end of the connection, my feed was projected onto a screen for the audience. Now we're art techies! Cool.

Our very own digital virtuoso.

When it came time for the live interview, we were able to show the art in the Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art exhibit that they were showing in their gallery. I pretended that I did this all the time and tried to project an air of casual finesse, and I'm pretty sure it worked. Don't tell them that we were just kind of winging it and hoping nothing fucked up. Oops, a cuss word. When I introduce myself to my students on our first day of class, I tell them Sometimes I cuss, so if you don't like it maybe you should take someone else's class. Godam it. Then I laugh and they do too. This here is the Bible belt, so sometimes I get a few forced smiles, but that's Ok, because it becomes a lightweight litmus test to see which of them may be a future artist.

I had this weird dream where I got nailed for saying bad words, but it turned out to be just an exit. My son is a good sport about helping me with photos like this as we walk through life. I'm ensuring that he has the same experiences as I did growing up with a bunch of other Indian kids, whatever that means... (Photo by T'naa McNeil)

At any rate, the Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art project has been circulating a lot lately, most recently at the Pequot Museum and Keene College. My art gets around more than me lately-- what's that all about? I'm getting jealous of my art and want to go to the Pequot Museum too. Dang. When I posted the update recently, it occurred to me that when us six artists did the collaborative project back in 2004, I made a lot of photos of Frank and I making the lithographs. Things got busy and I never did post them, so here they are, arriving on Indian time. Once I came home a bit late and my son chastised me for being tardy. I told him A Professor is never late, T'naa McNeil. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. Delivered with a small smile, of course, also mentioning that wizards sometimes copy our scholarly ways.

When I talk to my wife every day, I always ask if our million-dollar check came in today. It's one of our little rituals, and she usually says something like, Why yes, as a matter of fact it did, now you can be an artist. Then I say, Hey, I'm already an artist! Well how do you like that, she says. Then we go about our regular business, which involves talking to the dogs and patting the boy on the head. On one of those regular days, the notice for my participation in the Migrations project arrived and I called the Tamarind to arrange the travel dates to either the Tamarind or Crow's Shadow. I asked if I could collaborate with Frank Janzen at the Crow's Shadow on the Umatilla Rez next to Pendleton, Oregon.

Getting to the Rez was about four hours from home via I-84, and when I was there they still had a few retro signs around, as a magnet for people like me who were hungry. While driving onto the Umatilla Rez, I came across this Espresso thing on the way to Crow's Shadow and took it as a very, very good omen since I love coffee.

I always try to be respectful of Sacred Grounds.

After our polite introductions, Frank Janzen and I got right to work and dove right in. We got along well, lying down what was expected from both of us for this collaboration. Frank was easy going and an artist first I think, which was why we were able to speak the same lingo and just let the small stuff blow out the window as we experimented with various things during the entire two weeks of our collaboration. I relied on him heavily for his expertise while we both strove to actualize what I'd visualized for the art. We both loved the idea of the happenstance inherent with what sometimes happens with lithography. I've always been partial to the film She's Gotta Have it, by Spike Lee, especially the part where one of the characters' favorite lines was Please baby, please baby, please baby, please? That has been my mantra for quite some time and it was invoked many times to the heavens throughout the collaboration. I'm not sure, but I think it usually works because I'm most sincere when I ask.

I was a bit different than Frank's usual collaborators because my media was both photography and digital media, as opposed to being a painter, drawer (is that a proper term for someone who draws, or is a drawer just something in a desk?), or a regular printmaker. I must admit that I felt that I was pretending to know what I was doing, but on the other hand, I spent a couple of weeks making images prior to arriving at the Crow's Shadow and brought a lot of images to experiment with. I was quite proud of how well I armed myself for the encounter and had backup plans on the side just in case anything went the path of total ruination. I didn't have any plans of last resort however, so the stuff had to work, come hell or whatever.

Living by your wits means realizing that there was no scanner anywhere, and by the way, you do work in digital media, right? Aha! Your camera can be a scanner if you've been saying your Holy Smackers diligently.

In reality, I did a lot of research prior to going to the mountaintop, and my favorite artist by a long shot was Jaune Quick-To See Smith, one of the Jurors with the project. She was my artist hero and I'd get as many books and catalogs as I could find with her art; sometimes going to sleep reading late into the night with her catalogs scattered around me. She is the lithography master and I loved her beautiful visual aesthetic coupled with her wry wit and intellectual commentary. She was the artist I was pretending to be, but didn't let that stop me, even as I realized that my visual vernacular was all my own too, so what was to worry about?

Jaune Quick-To See Smith's poster for our First Nations Conference in 2004 when she was one of our keynote speakers and featured artists.

For the project, each artist was allowed five plates per lithograph, so our challenge was where to place them, what size, color, and so on. We had to place the prints on the plates very precisely prior to exposing them in the darkroom.


As a photographer, I readily identified with the plate-making process because it involved making a negative, exposing it with UV light and then processing it in a darkroom. All of those things were perfectly natural to me and it helped me with the creative process immensely. I felt like a photo lab rat again and finally breathed easier. I was able to make these two photos in darkness because my digital camera had a true infrared feature.


The images looked even cooler on the aluminum plate than I'd imagined. There was a very sumptuous tactile nature to them that was completely new to me. And this was before any inks were involved, which was really invigorating, and I wanted to ink them up right then and there! By now it looks like there were only moments between these steps, but some of them took an entire day to do properly, and the days were literally flying by. I had no idea what day it was for the most part. There were a few mistakes here and there, such as a plate that didn't look the way we'd expected, so we'd just make another. A few of the small mistakes looked cool, so we let them be, agreeing that just in case anyone asked, hey, it was a lot of hard work to get that look.

When Frank put on all his protective gear I stood far back and used a short telephoto lens. Ok all you lithographers, what's he doing here? Do I even want to know? Frank was clearly a well- seasoned pro with the press; it seemed to be an extension of his arm. That red bottle had the nasty stuff in it, and I still stood way back and left the room until the fumes cleared the air. Frank was a safety first kind of guy, which made me feel more comfortable as my fingernails fell off. Just kidding! He was looking after everyone's safety at all times.

It seems to me that every art form has a magical aspect to it, in spite of knowing the physical and scientific properties of things like silver halide coated on photographic paper. When you get right down to it, it's simply magic to see a photographic image emerge from the nothingness of seemingly blank paper. The same was true of seeing a test print from this plate, it was breathtaking to see how the image looked as it was carefully peeled back. I found myself subconsciously holding my breath until it was peeled all the way back and Frank laughed, saying nearly everyone does that.

Selecting colors was really, really fun and this was the part where you attempt to pre-visualize how that layer would look on that particular paper. The other challenging part was figuring out how the various colors would potentially interact with each other. Will one dominate the other in unexpected ways or clash instead of harmonize? I was very sure of the dominant color for the prints, a color named Chilkat Blue in Tlingit. It was a copper patina color and would change shades depending on how it aged, the light, or which artist mixed the colors. It is in the turquoise group of colors and was at the essence of the concept of Migrations for me; the color made an instant migration home to our ancient tribal lands and made me feel like an important part of myself was merging with the art. When we got the color, I knew instantly that it was perfect.

Frank and I got the color I was exploring for using various colors of inks, including phthalo blue, white and other mysterious inks, sheens and or tints. As I recall, we spent almost an entire morning mixing a small spectrum of variations of this color. Frank was really great with this part and if he thought I was being too fussy, he never let on.

I thought some extraordinary aspects of the inks was the ability to do things like alter its opacity, its subtle color differentials and the delicate luminosity which gave it an understated glow that was thoroughly unexpected. What a marvelous surprise. I instantly loved lithography and we hadn't even made a print yet. See how the inks glow in the reflectance of Frank's shirt? Watching Frank with that big roller made me realize that there is such a thing as artistry in technique, they are not necessarily separate. He obviously transcended the ordinary and his years of training as a master lithographer at the Tamarind Art Institute certainly manifested itself here. It was like an elegant dance, replete with rhythm, sound and impeccable timing. You could hear when the inks were on the roller perfectly and precisely because it made a peculiar wet smacking noise that sounded different when it was just right.


The proof prints were nothing less than superb and it was pleasing to actually see the characteristics of the inks mentioned above and how they interacted with the paper and other inks. Some pleasant surprises were how the other layers of inks held their integrity and had an understated sense of dimensionality within the flat surface. I think this had to do with the luminance and various levels of opacity of the inks that were interacting with the paper. You could see that various layers of ink were either in front of or behind other ones, and some of them were lightly absorbed into the paper, giving them a slightly different look. My experience as a photographer helped me immensely, because I was very used to evaluating extremely subtle nuances of both my photographs and digital prints.


I think that the coolest and most gratifying parts of being an artist are seeing your work come alive and have spark because it involves so many disparate elements, from your own personal visual aesthetic, to your intellect, intuition and how one generally strives to simply make sense of the world. Because the world constantly changes, it is an unending act; not futile by any means, but always challenging and certainly very fulfilling, especially when we get it right.

At this juncture, I noticed how Frank kept meticulous notes on everything we'd been doing the past two weeks. He explained plainly that after I leave, he has to print the editions and needs to be able to precisely replicate everything we'd done. Ohhhh. It never occurred to me that what we were doing was making a number of artist's proofs and he would be doing the lion's share of the work printing the editions after I left.


One of the last things we did as a collaborative pair was to have me approve the proofs. As I recall, they didn't have titles yet, but I designated, signed and dated them. This felt splendid and maybe even bordering on magnificent. We were both beyond exhausted, our two week collaboration had literally taken everything out of us. In a good way. Don't we look happy and ready to have another go at it? Well, maybe later.

Native Epistemology

Edward Curtis' Last Photograph

The best part was that this same process was going on with five other artists all summer long and culminated in a series of exhibitions all over the country. A book was published with essays by leading critics, art historians and theorists with portfolios of our art. The exhibitions are still going strong, including the one currently at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. One of the benefits of the project was receiving a copy of the lithographs made by the other artists; I really love how each one of us offered our own interpretation of what the concept of Migrations meant to us and the various visual aesthetics we all captured. Here's to Migrations, and I'd like to offer a sincere thank you to everyone who made this art project possible, especially Marjorie Devon, at the Tamarind Institute, who gathered up all the people with innovative ideas about how to put forth such an ambitious idea in the first place, and to my partner in crime, Mr. Frank Janzen, Master Lithographer extraordinaire.


Artists:
Steven Deo
Tom Jones
Larry McNeil
Ryan Lee Smith
Star Wallowing Bull
Marie Watt

Jurors:
Marjorie Devon, Director of the Tamarind Art Institute
Siri Engberg, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Walker Art Center, Juror
Jaune Quick-To See Smith, Artist, Independent Curator, Scholar & Activist, Juror
Truman Lowe, Artist, Scholar, Curator & Advocate, Juror
Deborah Wye, Chief Curator of Prints & Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art

Contributing Authors:
Kathleen Howe, Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art
Lucy Lippard, Critic, Author, Activist, Independent Curator, Feminist & Theorist
Gerald McMaster, Artist, Scholar, Curator, Arts Administrator, Activist
Jo Ortel, Associate Professor at Beloit College, Author, Art Historian & Theorist

Tamarind Master Superstar Printers:
Deborah Chaney
Frank Janzen (at the Crow's Shadow)
Bill Lagattuta
James Tesky

Primary Funding:
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
National Endowment for the Arts

Here is a link about the organizers, jurors and contributing authors for Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art

UNM Press, link for Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art (low stock, nearly out of print).

Tamarind Institute
Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts

TREX, The Traveling Exhibitions Program of the Museum of New Mexico.

All of the above is © Copyright Larry McNeil, 2009, All Rights Reserved.

Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Keene College

Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art on Exhibit through January 9, 2010

It is quite the honor to show this art at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Gunalshéesh, thank you. I've heard nothing but good things about the museum and would like to visit it sometime. Tribal museums have a special place in my heart, because they generally have a remarkable connection to the people that honors the richness and diversity of the indigenous cultures and societies of the people of the Americas. Many tribal museums also distinguish themselves from the crowd by prioritizing indigenous values as a part of their mission statements. I always feel instantly at home in them. Not only that, they usually have killer cafeterias with authentic indigenous food; that may be my new criteria for museum participation. When I get queries from curators, I'll ask them to send me a copy of their cafateria menu beforehand.

This exhibition is also being shown at the Keene State College Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery in New Hampshire. One of my ex-colleagues and MFA school buddies, Joan O'Beirne (who teaches in the Keene State Art Department) invited me to do a very cool online interview with her students this week. We used Skype and had me do a presentation about the art in general and had a Q&A session afterward, all online. How cool is that? Here is a screen shot of us getting ready for the online session. I used a Lowel Tota light in my office to give it some nice lighting. I talked about my art in general and the lithographs that I made as part of the Migrations project. It was fun, the first time I've done a visiting artist gig online. I take that back, I was part of another online group art project two years ago with Maria Williams and the high tech digital project she developed at the University of New Mexico two years ago.

McNeil as a visiting artist at Keene College via Skype.

At any rate, this art exhibit showcases the work of six Native artists who worked closely with master printers at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM, and at the Crow's Shadow Press on the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon.

The six artists in this important show-Steven Deo, Tom Jones, Larry McNeil, Ryan Lee Smith, Star Wallowing Bull, and Marie Watt, and they represent a wide range of stylistic approaches, tribal affiliations, and media. Now showing in the Mashantucket Gallery. This exhibition was organized by the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque in collaboration with the Tamarind Institute at UNM. Support for this project was provided by none other than the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The "kicker" for my participation was when I heard our good friend Jaune Quick-To See Smith was involved. As soon as I heard she was participating, in went my materials to this juried show. Jaune inspired entire generations of artists, me included. While making a lot of my own art, I would keep her catalogs around the studio for inspiration. One of my all-time favorite prints of hers is Indian Heart. It is a contemporary masterpiece and still takes my breath away.

The companion book is beautifully illustrated with high quality reproductions, and the essays by various scholars and critics are uniquely insightful and well written. I really love this exhibition, Migrations, New Directions in Native American Art, because the art is very invigorating with an intellectual edge while still being quite beautiful. I fully credit my fellow artists, and it has been fun to see the new art they've been producing since when the lithographs were made for this exhibition in 2004.

New Group Exhibition at Crisp Museum

The Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico has the Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art exhibition traveling to the Crisp Museum from October 17 through December 20th, 2008 (Hmm. Very auspicious dates. It comes down the day before the Winter Solstice).

The Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Museum is located at the Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, Missouri (south of St. Louis). This Migrations show is still one of my favorite exhibitions from the past few years; Marjorie Devon at the Tamarind put a lot of very careful thought into its planning. Well, the Eiteljorg exhibition was hard to beat too, but that is another story...

Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art (Part Two by McNeil)

Three Part Series:
1. Intro & Vision for Migrations
2. Jurors & Contributing Authors
3. Migrations Artists

Part Two, Jurors & Contributing Authors

Jurors

An eclectic panel of jurors were brought in; it seemed to me that a common thread that wove this very diverse group of jurors together was that they're all quite the art intellectuals who have been advocating for art that transcends the ordinary; that art is vital to humanity and that they have all dedicated their lives and careers towards helping to ensure that our museums, art organizations, artists and the public hold these sensibilities to be true. I know that it is not easy to do this, because there is always a strong contingent that would prefer to see the status quo remain the same, which is the antithesis of what art should embody, but that's another story. These are my own opinions and observations; I don't think any of the jurors actually said the above themselves. They are who inspired me to submit art to this particular jury; it was clear that this Migrations project strove to do something very special and I wanted to be a part of it, so I crossed my fingers, said my holy smackers and sent in my stuff (these are technical art terms by the way).

Marjorie Devon, Director, of the Tamarind Institute seemed like a natural choice as a juror, especially for this project, what with all of her years of experience working with a very diverse group of international artists. She had a shrewd sensibility of the uniqueness that each artist could bring to the project.

Siri Engberg is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They described their internal long-range plan as the desire to create "a pioneering 21st-century multidisciplinary arts center with audience engagement and experiential learning at its core." It is known for its major exhibitions of 20th-century art, for its presentation of vanguard music, dance, theater, film, and video, and for its innovative education programs. The Walker is definitely on my list of places to visit; what can I say? It looks different and thought provoking; I remember seeing äda web years ago and am glad to see that it's still as vibrant as ever.

Jaune-Quick-to-See Smith, artist and independent curator, writer, advocate and critic was among this stellar group brought in to jury this Migrations project. Jaune has been one of the most dynamic activists promoting Indigenous artists in recent memory. She is selfless in this respect and donates her time to many projects. She is a frequent artist collaborator at the Tamarind Art Institute in Albuquerque.




Truman Lowe is an artist, scholar, advocate and Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC among other things. Truman is a true Indigenous intellectual and is a Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the very prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Art. His art is in numerous major museum collections around the world.

Deborah Wye is none other than the Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (click on this link to the Museum of Modern Art's site of Audio Archives and scroll down to find a lot of audio programs, including many featuring Wye). Needless to say, MOMA is one of the premier arts institutions in the world. I heard that she had the walls of the remodeled print galleries painted gray "so that the prints with their white margins pop off the wall." Wye has been the Chief Curator since 1996 and is the caretaker of what many critics consider to be among the most comprehensive collections of contemporary prints in the world.

Contributing Authors

Lucy Lippard is quite the hip art intellectual, critic, author, activist, feminist and theorist who wrote an insightful chapter titled "Moving Days." I really value Lucy because she's influenced how people re-think the status quo, not only in the art world, but how we think about what's happening in our American culture. Not to be overly simplistic, but I think that once we get too smug about our scholarship, it needs to be given a decent rattling to see how sound our presumptions hold up. Sometimes this translates to putting forth a paradigm that other scholars cannot see, which is part of what makes her more unique than your run of the mill art expert in the world of academia.

With her Moving Days essay, Lippard brought her laser vision to bear on the cultural landscape that we're all constantly trying to figure out. I liked how she opened her essay with a quote from Oscar Howe's 1958 letter to the Philbrook Museum's Annual, upon being rejected because his work was too modern and abstract to be "Indian." It inferred that the art world wasn't always ready for what various artists have to present with their art, and how museums commonly play the role of gatekeepers for how we define art, especially when it crosses cultural borders. She mentioned the students and faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (where I would humbly add that I helped add substance to their Photography area as a faculty in the 1990's).

I would completely agree that it is critical that Indigenous artists know precisely who our early master artists were and that we have a long history of artists who have struggled to make a place for ourselves in the art world and that mediocrity was never all right; that in addition to everything else, we continue to break new ground with our art. I like her succinct writing style. She asks, "Where and when did contemporary native 'Modernism' begin?" Good question, especially when it is framed by her assertion that "the crucial difference between the Studio School (Dorothy Dunn's) and the IAIA is that the latter was founded and run by Native artists. One of the realities of being a faculty member at the IAIA was that we valued the Indigenous knowledge, or epistemology that students brought with them and we used the type of knowledge that they had ingrained within themselves as momentum for their own art-making practices. It meant that other non-western philosophies were a part of how we nurtured our students, including honoring the ancient spiritual beliefs and world-views that they brought with them. It meant that we had to be more sensitive to the non-academic elements that art schools usually reject, because in order to nurture our students, we had to be open to their entire identity, not just sections of it.

Lucy was also shrewd enough to recognize the implied conflict between the terms "traditional and contemporary." In my opinion, the terms traditional and contemporary are sometimes perceived to be polarized beasts on opposite sides of a compass and artists had to choose one, because that is the nature of things. Of course, we indigenous artists know that is completely ridiculous; I just finished writing an essay about this for our own Northwest Coast cultural organization, the "Sealaska Heritage Institute," in Juneau, Alaska, due to be published this summer.

Regarding history, one of the best phrases in the book was where Lucy quoted the Mi'kmaq video artist Mike McDonald, "I once heard an elder say that the great crime in this land was not that the natives had their language and culture beaten out of them in boarding schools- the great crime was that the people who came here did not adopt the culture of the land." It is this sensitivity that makes Lucy's research so relevant; she gets right to the heart of the issue without flinching or shirking away. Thank you Lucy, you have the sincere appreciation of generations of Indigenous artists.


Jo Ortel is an Associate Professor at Beloit College and the Chair of their Department of Art and Art History and author whose area of expertise is nineteenth and twentieth-century and contemporary art, including feminist and Postcolonial art and theory. Her chapter titled, "Multiple Migrations: (E)merging Imagery," discussed issues that are of significance to both artists and scholars, especially the ongoing debate about the issue of meaning in art.

Jo opens her essay by reflecting about the 2004 Whitney Biennial and how a critic proclaimed, "the decade of socially and politically engaged art was over." That was quite the stentorian proclamation. Maybe even some kind of a weird junior manifesto?

Jo pointed out that "she argued- rightly I think- that the art selected for inclusion in the 2004 show largely retreated from the single-minded obsession with the world's ills." Jo added, "In their choices for 2004, the curators overstated the resurgence of escapism in contemporary art, in my opinion, and underrepresented art addressing issues of cultural identity. Although many artists have turned away in recent years from engagement with the world, identity politics and political and social concerns remain urgent, compelling subjects of investigation."

I'm sure there was a large multitude of artists who breathed a collective sigh of relief upon reading the above. I can't imagine a more stultifying, or mind-numbing act than to have a critic proclaim that making art that has relevance to our times is passé, like a frivolous fashion had passed. This discounts the intellectual aspect of being an artist, to say nothing of a human being making art about what they're passionate about. Do we hear the same argument about authors? "Oh, sorry, you can't write about life anymore. It's way too intense for our people."

While surfing an entire litany of banal television programs recently, the pop celebrity of the hour, Paris Hilton was asked what she thought of her book being on the Wall Street Journal's bestseller list. Her answer? "What's the Wall Street Journal?" I got the feeling that back in 2004 Paris may have been a gallery darling at the Whitney (had she shown up) for her intellectual prowess. I apologize, Americans may sometimes epitomize political naiveté, but not that bad; I take the Paris thing back. I think. Maybe. It just seems to me that ignorance and indifference is a bad combination, especially for an artist, so I heartily second Jo's point of view and thank her for writing about it in the book, because it was so relevant to the year the Migrations art was being created.

In my opinion it was a smart strategy to have the various authors assigned specific tasks, such as researching both the Tamarind and the Crow's Shadow Art Institute. It gave a well-rounded view of the prime ingredients that made the exhibition distinctive. You'll have to ask each artist whether Jo's interpretations of his or her art was accurate. All I know is that her take on my own art made me laugh, which meant that it was pretty much right on target. I thought that her interview was thoughtful and she did her homework about what informs the art before she talked to us.

Jo and Lucy have reaffirmed my belief that artists need critics and historians and that at their best, they're able to add momentum to what artists do. On the other hand, some historians and critics do just the opposite, so I guess us artists really need a healthy skepticism about their profession, leave it to them and go about making our art (Oops, I guess that means I shouldn't be writing this). On the other hand, there is a convincing argument being made by various Indigenous artists that in order for our history to be truly accurate, it needs to be written by Indigenous intellectuals and writers; that a powerful sense of sovereignty is required as a key ingredient for our truths to emerge. At any rate, I am sincerely grateful for their contributions to the book; thank you, Gunalchéesh.


Kathleen Howe is the Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art and professor of Art History. I've got to fess up and mention that I studied with her while an MFA student at the University of New Mexico. I asked to take an independent study with her and she was gracious enough to approve it (which included research on the French photographer Felix Bonfils, but that's another story). Her essay "A Quiet Commitment: Tamarind and Native American Artists" was very informative and taught me a lot of valuable information. Her essay shared a lot of the Tamarind's history, including that they came from LA to UNM in 1970 and their commitment to pedagogy with their Master Printer program. Kathleen put forth the argument that then Director Clinton Adams encountered a very large and diverse arts community in New Mexico (that included many Hispanic and Native American artists) that necessitated a shift towards a more diverse printmaking workshop and that it was a welcome part of their new strategy.

Kathleen described Fritz Scholder (who was then teaching at the IAIA) as one of the early Native artists that Adams approached to make lithographs at the Tamarind. In a four-month span, they made an astounding twenty-one lithographs. Kathleen described how other Native artists followed- T.C. Cannon, Patrick Swazo Hinds, Dan Namingha, R.C. Gorman and that Jaune Quick-To-See Smith started making lithographs at the Tamarind in 1979. She mentions the 1986 transition of directors between Adams and Devon. She describes the influx of new Indigenous exhibitions on the national scene that emerged in the 1980's and who was generally doing what and where.

This was a partial survey of contemporary Indigenous art, and valuable because you don't see them that often. Kathleen reminded us that "From its inception, Migrations was intended to redress the lack of critical appraisal..." The plan was "to invite the critics to visit the presses while the artists were in residence to foster knowledge of their work and to encourage the exchange of ideas." I think that it's really great that Kathleen was able to write this chapter, given her own history of working at the UNM Museum and knowing a lot of the people she wrote about, or at least being able to interview people who knew what was going on back then.


Gerald McMaster is a First Nations artist from the Siksika Nation in Alberta who is an artist, activist, scholar, curator and arts administrator. His art, which is satirical, helped inspire my own art at times. McMaster created the first national Indian and Inuit art gallery at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and was appointed to the dual roles of Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources and Director’s Special Assistant for Mall Exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. These two key roles had him centrally placed as a major influence on Indigenous art and artists in both Canada and the US.

His essay, "Crow's Shadow: Art and Community" describes the background information that led to its formation on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon and how James Lavadour (Walla Walla) led the way in order to make it a reality. Gerald wrote, "This is the story of Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts and James Lavadour's ambitious vision to establish a community resource that would support Native art in all its dimensions." He writes a brief background history of the Umatilla Reservation; who lives there and the political realities they had to deal with, including a powerful sense of sovereignty that drove all else. He tells of how Lavadour worked with their Education Director Woesha Hampson (Ho-Chunk, and my sister-in law's sister) with curriculum development and how, "like many people on the reservation, Lavadour had a strong social conscience and an idealistic commitment to community... he hoped to use art to effect social change on the reservation."

Lavadour was used to working with other Indigenous artists with a similar sense of sovereign status and community, and that serving their own people was just as important as being an artist; that it was critical to prioritize service to the Indigenous community. One could make the argument that this service to their own communities is what adds a level of reality to their own art. They're able to avoid the stereotypical and starry-eyed notions of Indigenous identity and use an exciting new visual vocabulary that is sometimes unique unto themselves. He believed that the Crow's Shadow "could act as a community based arts organization that could attract resources and also be a conduit for Native artists into the mainstream art world."

Gerald wrote about how Frank Janzen, their Tamarind-trained master printer came to work at the Crow's Shadow and helped with not only getting the presses set up, but also with programming and day to day operations, along with his key role of collaborating with artists with printing their hand-made lithographs. Three of the Migrations artists made their lithograph editions with Frank- Steven Deo, Ryan Lee Smith, and myself. I had heard from Marie Watt how outstanding it was to work with Frank, so I asked the Tamarind if I could print at the Crow's Shadow. Besides, I thought it would be very cool to make art on the Rez for two weeks.

What made Frank special was he is an artist himself and not simply a print technician, which brought a special artist's sensibility to the project. Same with the other Tamarind-trained printers, especially Bill Lagattuta who actually trained many of the Tamarind master printers. Frank had to do a lot of creative problem solving with me because I worked primarily with digital media. Our challenge was to translate my digital images into the aluminum plates that were used to print each of the five lithograph layers. We had to figure out the proper exposure for the original acetate negatives and in turn, the exposure for the plates from the digitally based negatives. Frank had an uncanny knack for getting them right on target even though it was a newer aspect of lithography.

One of my own favorite aspects of the process was playing and experimenting with the various inks for the prints themselves. It was exhilarating to see the myriad of possibilities for the prints, including the colors, opacities and how they interact and cause subtle changes when layered. I liked how one is often forced to be fearless with all of our creative decisions and how sometimes it was like rolling the dice to see what happens, which inferred that a peculiar kind of "art luck" was involved. All I can say is that if this was true, Frank was my big-time good luck guy. In reality, luck had little to do with anything. Our creative power essentially drove everything, coupled with a highly skilled application of technical prowess. Thank you Frank and James. You are both the heart and soul of the Crow's Shadow.

Gerald's essay gave a unique insider's view of what made the Crow's Shadow earn a singular distinction in the world of contemporary art, which serves to inform a critical aspect of contemporary Indigenous art. This act is in complete harmony with Gerald's long history of service to the Indigenous community, and we're lucky to have him as such a selfless contributor. I've read the book twice already, not to mention just looking at the images. I am honored to have played a role in it's existence and that my own art and sensibilities are floating around in the mix somewhere, especially when one considers that the people involved with Migrations embraced the philosophy that a contemporary art community is vital to its own evolution and health.

Part Three, "Migrations Artists" willl be posted soon.

Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art

Three Part Series:
1. Intro & Vision for Migrations
2. Jurors & Contributing Authors
3. Migrations Artists

Part One, Intro & Vision for Migrations
It was a pleasant surprise to learn that the Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art exhibition was going to be showing at the Boise State University Visual Arts Center Gallery. I am going to give a public talk about the Migrations art on February 8th at 6:30pm in the Hemingway Gallery.

We're at the start of our new semester here at BSU, and I'm writing this primarily for our new batch of art students, including our usual suspects in the MFA area. Consider this to be a pedagogical entry that sometimes veers off to commentary from an artist, which is a very accurate reflection of my life as both an art professor and artist.

If you can, go to the above link and get the catalog; it's more a combination of a focused survey about Contemporary Native American Art and a broader view that includes a more inclusive interpretation of how to describe relevant art being produced in America at the start of the 21st Century. Please visit the numerous links in this posting to get an inkling of who and what the art, artists, jurors, writers, contributors, organizations and so on are all about. It really is an all-star list from the world of contemporary art. No lightweights here.

One of my own most challenging aspects of teaching art (to both undergraduates and our MFA students) has to do with how to get them to navigate towards finding significant meaning with their own art. I require them to research other artists, especially those of whom are wrestling with the creative process in ways similar to their own challenges. I would put forth the argument that there are a lot of artists out there that are off the beaten path, but are making great art nonetheless. See the article "Tribal Hybrids" in the Art News June 2007 issue, by Cynthia Nadelman regarding many Indigenous artists that are not nationally known yet, but are on the verge of various types of breakthroughs. On the other hand, this Migrations exhibition is a fairly high profile exhibition with lots of venues and a most excellent catalog with lots of interesting critics, artists and art professionals contributing essays. It has certainly acted as momentum for not only the creation of new art, but for more venues and opportunities for us, the Migrations artists (Well, for me anyway).

A Rarefied Vision & Rounding Up Key Support

The Migrations, New Directions in Native American Art project "was developed to identify and showcase Native American Artists who are working with a contemporary vocabulary," as written by Marjorie Devon, the Director of the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico. Marjorie and the Tamarind have a history of innovation as being a world-renowned center for fine art lithography and influence on contemporary art for the last few decades. The Tamarind has a long track record of producing not only editions of lithographs by a who's who of national and international artists, but of also training new master lithographers. The Tamarind also goes out of their way to work with Indigenous artists, and I'm happy to say that I've worked with their master printers a couple of times on collaborative lithograph editions. Their staff people are creative, smart and personable problem-solvers when working with artists. The Crow's Shadow Art Institute was brought in as collaborative printers too (more on them later). Marjorie Devon was definitely one of the key players that brought everyone together; one of her gifts is doing the behind the scenes work that makes art projects a reality, which is so rarefied these days. Thank you Marjorie, you are amazing and it doesn't surprise me that you are constantly bringing forth new art projects in addition to running the Tamarind's operations (which includes acquiring a new building by the way).

The Migrations project was partially funded by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (the foundation is leading the way with a lot of innovative arts initiatives and funding) and the National Endowment for the Arts (stop by and take a peek at what your arts organization is up to). Getting the funding to initiate the project was a major coup in itself, let alone doing all of the planning and work to make the Migrations project a reality. This was one of those ambitious art projects that involved people who represented a wide spectrum from the art world, which is what took it to a higher critical level.

It was clear that everyone involved had higher hopes than usual for this art project, and each brought their own unique sensibilities to the project. Linda Weldy Bahm, the Director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, wrote in the catalog that "Migrations exemplifies three goals shared by the University Art Museum and the Tamarind Institute- presenting the work of outstanding Native American artists working with a contemporary vocabulary, broadening the understanding of contemporary Native American Art, and encouraging serious discourse related to Native American Artists." I'd have to say that they were aggressive about carrying out these plans, as seen with how they initiated a critical discourse with the variety of jurors and writers they brought in to compose essays for the catalog.

See Parts 2 & 3, which talks about the jurors, contributing authors and artists, to be posted soon.


ISBN 10:

ISBN 13:


University of New Mexico Press, Edited by Marjorie Devon