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As Center for Visual Arts director and curator Cecily Cullen notes, today’s Native American artists don’t live in the past. And in pulling work together for Cross Currents, the second half of a two-part exhibition series Cullen started in 2009, she specifically looked for artists who respectfully nod to the traditional to express contemporary ideas and issues.
“These artists are not interested in preserving the historical or romanticized version of Native American art,” she explains. “Instead, they’re standing up to say that these individual cultures they come from are still existing and thriving.” But, she adds, the message of a new identity put across by the nine artists of Cross Currents is a visceral one, though it ranges in opposite directions, from the subtle works of Marie Watt, who cuts up and stacks Indian blankets into installations, to the more blatant “In-Appropriate” paintings by Frank Buffalo Hyde, who addresses cultural appropriation by portraying white ingenues like Gwen Stefani and Drew Barrymore in full headdress. This is a show that has the power to punch you in the stomach, but it sometimes does so with a modicum of humor.
Cross Currents opens today at the CVA, 965 Santa Fe Drive, with a reception and artist panel from 6 to 8 p.m. and runs through February 8; admission is free. Photographer Will Wilson, a participating artist who shoots images of modern Native Americans using a classic tintype camera, will offer workshops during the last week of the exhibit. For more information, visit the CVA online at msudenver.edu/cva.
Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: Nov. 22. Continues through Feb. 8, 2013
