Double Hawks Getting Ready to Dance is about the excitement and fun the People have preparing for a social dance. People think about the coming dance for months, then weeks, then days. As the time gets closer, food gets prepared, songs are practiced, repairs on moccasins are made, and new outfits are readied, rattles are tested, and the water drum is re-stretched. Everyone wants to be together and DANCE!
The People love the feeling of being together dancing on the wooden floor of the Longhouse. Everyone loves hearing their favorite songs, the old songs and the new songs. Various groups of singers travel long distances to take their turn. There is tons of food for everyone. The People laugh and make jokes. Everywhere chatting and catching up conversations happen inside and outside the Longhouse. There are lots and lots of smiles. The entire world feels good.
Women are highly respected in Haudenosaunee society because of the roles they have played in the creation (Sky Woman) and in the formation of the Great Law (Jigonsaseh, the Mother of Nations). The earth itself is seen as a woman from which all things are born, creating new life that allows all of the living things on earth to continue into the future. In Haudenosaunee society, clan, national/tribal identity, and property rights are all determined through the maternal line; this is in keeping with the Six Nations’Great Law, which emphasizes a balance of male and female roles.
To the Haudenosaunee, the female is the gateway to producing life and is therefore traditionally to be held in the highest of regard. When my baby daughter arrived on the scene, I was amazed to have the great blessing of being given the tremendous gift of a daughter. This little person who is now a grown woman has changed my life and throughout her journey she continues to teach me.
I cherish all of my children and have taught them that “traditional Haudenosaunee society (and all other First Native Nations that I know of) maintains an intricate balance of gender roles” and not to involve themselves in gender war or the gender power struggles of others. While I have not always been able to enact this teaching, we work to remind each other and we are all getting better at it over time.
The practice of honoring the givers of life now includes cherishing my son’s wives. They are strong, vibrant and valiant women who bless all of our families together. Again, I learn so much.
A few weeks ago I wrote this poem for my daughter and emailed it to her. She wrote back, in her gratitude, that the poem had made her cry.
My Daughter
There is a woman known for her quiet strength
Now.
Once she was a big orange basketball
bouncing all over the court
Trying to get in the hoop.
She had a daughter -
A tiny oh so delicate and lovely baby girl
With black as night sticky-up hair
And jet eyes.
That child was born with the same quiet strength
Her mother came to possess.
Everywhere they went together
Others would remark about the beams
Of light
Surrounding her little baby.
That light made her calm down.
That light made her work to remember to see.
That light made her become.
Because even if she was willing to be
a bright orange basketball for herself.
She was not willing to continue bouncing all over
someone else’s court
looping into someone else’s hoop
When she had this pure
treasure of a pure beam of light
That came to her
as her daughter.
May we all truly love ourselves, so that we may fully love our children as Creation intends and strengthen our Nations forever.
At the first of December, my dad told me that I needed to do all of the clans as double animals. I had thought of this before, but because he requested it, I decided that it was a go. Double Beavers Make a Home is my first attempt at working through that request even though I have done herons and bears before.
When thinking about beavers for this art piece, I naturally began to think about how beavers make their homes. Beavers are one of a few animals who change the landscape to build their family homes. Humans are another.
Beaver lodges are made in the middle of streams and marshes that then become ponds and small lakes because of the beaver’s dams. The underwater entries make the beaver lodge safer from predators. Inside the lodge, it is warm and dry with a store of fresh water and collected edibles. The beavers home is made in anticipation of new life.
As I am working to make a new home, I have been thinking about how each time any of us changes our location - that new home is never the same as the original home. We do not reproduce our homes, we make new homes each and every time we move, each and every time we spring clean, each and every time we redecorate, reorganize, have a birth or a death. But where is the heart of these evolving homes and does that change?
The symbol of the arch with the circle underneath is the symbol of the beaver’s home in this image. It is a symbol that I have used since the 1970s. This symbol came to me as a very pregnant, young mother looking down at my very round belly. It has become a symbol of making new homes, of new life traveling to this earth, of expectations for expanding the joy of life in a new way. And while new life coming to the planet repeats itself as an action, it is never repeated exactly the same. Each time it is unique. Each time it is wonderous. This is one of the great mysteries of creation.
The arch symbol is also akin to the Haudenosaunee dome of heaven symbol. The dome of heaven is beaded into the skirts of Haudenosaunee women as a repetitive border. Here, on our great mother the earth, we all create under the dome of heaven – instructed to make homes that allow life to flourish.
Jim Denomie is known for his surrealistic painting style with cartoonish, “revisionist” depictions of Native American history. His body of work includes the socio-political renegade series, intuitive erotic landscapes, and his psychological paintings featuring the dream rabbit. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including a 2009 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art and a 2008 Bush Artist Fellowship. Denomie received his BFA degree from the University of Minnesota in 1995 and has since shown extensively in both Europe and the United States. He has work in the permanent collections of the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.
Denomie describes his narrative painting style as “metaphorical surrealism.” His paintings frequently examine historical and contemporary events in American and Native American history, as well as aspects of pop-culture, art history and Anglo-Indian relations.
Jim Denomie is a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Ojibwe in northern Wisconsin. He was born in Hayward, Wisconsin in 1955 and currently lives in Franconia, MN. Denomie lived on the reservation until the age of four when his family moved to Chicago, Illinois due to forced government relocation programs taking place within Native communities in the 1960s.
I love the close-up photo of his brush work in this painting, titled Man and Woman, 11″x14″, oil on canvas.
Gail Tremblay, faculty at The Evergreen State College, described Denomie’s work as that which both “sings and stings.” “To penetrate Jim Denomie’s work and to engage with its imagery, one has to let go of all stereotypes one has about American Indians and their art,” Tremblay writes in the Eiteljorg published book Art Quantum. “Indeed, few artists poke fun at stereotypes or at the romanticized images of ‘Noble Savages’ or primitive Indians with Denomie’s vigor. He holds his mirror up to Indigenous people as surely as he does to Americans and American culture. Denomie’s art addresses everyone with equal rigor and has important lessons for all viewers.”
In 2011, Denomie attended a 2 week printmaking residency at Crows Shadow on the Umatilla reservation in Oregon. “Regarding my residency at Crow Shadow, I am really looking forward to visiting the Northwest area again, seeing some old friends and meeting new ones, working with a master printer and making art. Although I have experience in monoprints and linoleum cuts, and recently took a print class at the [University of Minnesota] in lithography and etching, I would not call myself an experienced printer.”
Denomie wrapped up his time in the studio with an amazing body of 72 signed prints, spanning five monotype and monoprint series. Jim worked on a colorful monotype series titled “Blue Mountain Portraits” and a series of monochromatic monotypes using dark brown burnt umber ink. “It’s a variety of imagery, but mostly they’re all some sort of portraiture,” Denomie said.
“Originally, I thought maybe I would do a solid color background, but as I was inking up these plates I decided to go with three colors and just randomly develop a pattern,” Denomie said. “And so laying portraits over the tops of these random patterns would feed into the final project, where you’d get this unexpected juxtaposition of colors that wouldn’t have come if I’d have started with a blank palette.”
“My experience at Crow’s Shadow and my visit to Pendleton has been phenomenal. … I’ve met a lot of great people, very nice people,” Denomie said. “The art has been phenomenal too. I don’t believe I’ve ever created so much art in a two-week period as I have here.”
Wabooz Studio, Denomie’s studio is named for the Ojibwe word for rabbit representative of the Ojibwe trickster figure Nanaboujou. As an alter ego for Denomie, Wabooz makes multiple appearances in the art Jim creates. - And you know how I like rabbits!
Denomie’s point of view cross-cultivates art history with popular culture and Native American histories. The artist’s aesthetic perspective is a proactive platform, a truth articulated in a past/present commingling intended for liberation and understanding. Denomie acts as a social visionary with distinct referential tools.
Denomie’s monumentally scaled painting, Eminent Domain, a Brief History of America is a coast-to-coast extravaganza of Manifest Destiny in the twenty-first century that includes a naked Statue of Liberty and the Long Ranger and Tonto. Tonto says, “You lied to me!” to which the Lone Ranger responds, “Get used to it.”
When asked when he decided a painting was completed, Denomie stated:
…a painting is done when the artist dies. Previously, I felt that a painting was done when I have taken it as far as I could, at that point in time, and signed it. Now, if the painting is still in my possession and I am not impressed with it, I may rework it. A painting is like a motion picture, always evolving. We hit pause when it looks good to us and then we sign it. But we may come back to it sometime later and look at it again with a perspective enhanced by experience and development and say, “this painting needs more work.”
Denomie’s preferred creation time is in the evening while listening to music. He starts with an initial sketch which serves as a rough draft and continually refines it until it is ready to be transferred into a painting. At times Denomie mixes his paints directly on the canvas when working quickly. His large-scale works receive a ground layer of paint which lays out a basic composition. He describes his painting process as a “chess game”, derived from the many decisions he makes when placing, layering and constructing his detailed works.
In 2005, Denomie completed the task of painting at least one painting a day, for one year. Much of this work was showcased in the exhibition “New Skins” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2007.
During the year that Denomie painted a painting a day, he made himself paint at least one small canvas per day. These paintings were of a face, more or less of a Native person—sometimes a woman with two sets of concentric circles for breasts, more often a man with a headband and feather—with an open, toothy mouth, facing straight ahead. The faces were not large (5″x7″ or 8″x10″) and Denomie covered the surface area with wide strokes in bright colors, finishing each within fifteen or thirty minutes.
He did not try to create a perfect work of art; instead he let himself play with the paint. He used the colors already on the palette or added new ones based on his mood.
Daily surges of emotion affected the work—one day’s face grinning, another sour, one yelling—but more often the faces evolved their own personalities, their own neutral but suggestive expressions. When the face was done, Denomie signed the back and named it, if it happens to have reminded him of anyone.
Why did Denomie do the daily painting project? Denomie began the project because he found painting too often pushed to the side. Between work, family, and the rest of a normal life, he wasn’t getting time in his studio every day. When he did paint, he would feel “like a foreigner” to his own work. He wanted to develop a new habit of painting consistently.
Halfway through the project, Denomie was thrilled with his discoveries—all accidental, all not possible without the daily painting. He tells the story of one particularly difficult day when he thought he might not go out to the studio at all. Instead he decided to go out, take whatever color was on the palette, and just paint a circle with three lines through it. The resulting face—abstract, essential—so excited him that he stayed to paint another.
As the project went on, he found the faces becoming more raw, more askew, more independent of him. He worked towards balancing deliberation—since the painting time is brief, he made each stroke is important—intuitively tracing the desire that arose between himself, the paint, and the canvas. Denomie proved to himself that the project let him get his “head into the oven” of creativity.
To hear Mr. Denomie in his own words, folks can give a listen to his radio interview conducted by mnartists.org’s Marya Morstad. Audio Interview with Jim Denomie (MP3)
I am currently at the Art en Capital, Grand Palais, Paris, France November 27th through December 2nd. So much art to see and absorb. Beautiful foods to smell and taste. Love hearing the French language all through the streets, metro and cafes. Everywhere you go there is something beautiful to take in. See http://www.artencapital.fr/
I have 2 pieces in the show with the Native American and First Peoples delegation. A third piece is being shown at Dorothy’s Gallery, Paris with a reception on Friday evening. http://dorothysgallery.com/art/. My large work “The Greatest Strength is Gentleness” is included in the reputable French art magazine Univers des Arts. It is in the October-November issue 2012 Nº 166, on page 55. All of the artist’s images are available in the Art En Capital 2012 Salon Du Dessin Et De La Peinture A L’eau Paris Grand Palais 304 page show catalog.
The show is magnificent with 2500 artist from around the world. People were waiting in long lines (going around the building) outside the show on opening night. It was in-your-face obvious that the French people are dedicated to their great love of art.
From our group of Native artists, Roy Boney, of the Cherokee Nation, told about his piece and the fun of the Cherokee booger masks. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.
Russell Tall Chief and Ginette Adamson are the hardworking and dedicated organizers of our delegation and showing. Big gratitudes to both!! Each day promises to hold a grand new adventure for our crew of Native artists in Paris!
Below April White, myself, Russ Tall Chief and Candace Curr prepare to perform 2 dances for the art show. Big THANKYOU to Chantal Viellard for taking such beautiful photos!
Most of us love loons. We love their haunting, yet reassuring calls. We love their black and white patterning and we love their red eyes. We love how they let their little loons ride on their backs. We love their sleek shape floating among the waves of a lake. What is this magic of loons?
Many tribes have stories about the Pleiades star cluster. The beautiful night skies filled with wonder. Walking along a forest path, or on the beach in the middle of the night – gathering in all the huge full-of-night sky, full-of-stars shining all around and embracing us. What is it about that night sky overflowing with glowing, twinkling lights that delights us so much?
Sometimes that intense feeling that the world is an incredible place surrounds us – just picks us right up and says, “PAY ATTENTION – there’s a lot going on here!”
When I was a little 9 year old girl, I asked that night sky, “how I would be able to know the truth of things here on this planet?” A strong, yet gentle voice came into me…not just my mind, but filled up my entire being. That voice said, “Look inside – every answer you need will come to you there.” I felt that I had been packed with my own, very personalized suitcase. Inside the suitcase was something like a radar star detector. It has never failed me.
When my mother died, I knew the moment that she was gone and I watched her fly/swim across a star-filled sky. She was so beautiful and young again. I watched as every type of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual burden she carried with her on this earth dropped off from her being as she left the earth to go somewhere else.
“PAY ATTENTION – there’s a lot going on here!” – in even what appears to be the simplest of things, or the smallest of things like those incredible spots on a loon’s feathers that make us remember who we are in a star-filled night…
This year, multidisciplinary visual artist Shelley Niro was awarded the first laureate of the new Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Arts Award. The award celebrates the work of Aboriginal artists and arts leaders who have made significant contributions to the arts in Ontario. Her work challenges stereotypical images of Aboriginal peoples, has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She has received considerable attention for her films. Her art is “a bold assertion of selfhood rather than a search for identity.”
The 2012 jurors unanimously selected Shelley Niro for the award. They wrote that “her work is radical and unrelenting. They are ruminations on war, on life, on being a Mohawk woman… on being an Aboriginal person in Canada. She tells stories in fundamentally Indigenous ways, with humour, generosity and a strong sense of knowledge transfer, and gives freely to her community.”
OAC ChairMartha Durdin adds,“Congratulations to Shelley on this well-deserved award. Shelley personifies the innovation and creativity of Ontario’s indigenous arts community. OAC is proud to be inaugurating an award that honours the vital contributions of Aboriginal artists and arts leaders to Ontario’s cultural landscape.”
Shelley Niro (1954 – ) is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation was raised at Six Nations of the Grand River territory in Ontario, Canada.
A painter, photographer, sculptor and filmmaker who has collected numerous accolades and awards, including an Eiteljorg Fellowship and the Woman in Film/GM Acceleration Grant. Niro’s first full-length film Kissed By Lightning premiered at Toronto’s imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and won the Santa Fe Film Festival’s 2009 Milagro Award for Best Indigenous Film. Her short film The Shirt, was debuted in Venice, Italy during the 50th Venice Biennial as well as was shown at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. She is currently working on her second feature film, The Incredible 25th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw.
I like the invention of story. I like how they help us to recognize that other people have done the same things as we have, in other times. I feel this is important, as those stories are still here with us. Many artists continue to use mythological stories, and sometimes base their artwork on the stories. Sometimes there is a clear moral, but often it isn’t apparent, and the interpreter has to rethink the narrative or embellish on it. In a contemporary context, I like to parallel the myth with my life and the lives of people around me.
The portraits I take are of people I love and care about. I like to use their images as a reminder of why I make the work. By including them in my work I get to see their faces, and this keeps them close to my heart.
Shelley Niro exposes myths about Native people through focusing on individuals that she knows and cares about: her mother, other family members, and herself. Single shots, triptychs, and multiple-panel series, with both historical and new photographs, are used to show Native people’s full lives as individuals in various aspects of multiple societies. Niro has written that the photographs are “a play on anthropological notions. It is one of those sentences that I have heard all my life. I wanted to make fun of the acceptance of what other people say about the society that I come from.”
Shelley Niro, “Mohawks in Beehives,” 1991, hand-tinted photograph
So I started using my family in my work because they’re sort of representative. I won’t say typical. Who’s typical? But to me these family images are the common images that I live with. At the same time, using these basic images was a self-actualization process where, if you start relating to the people you’re looking at, and the more images you see of somebody that looks like you, the more you can accept yourself, whereas if you see images of people that you have no connection with and can’t relate to, then you’re doubting your own presence. You say, “I don’t look like that.” I thought by using these images of women, it actually creates a welcoming feeling, and it makes other Indian women say, “I can relate to these images.” A lot of women have said that to me that they can see their own aunts or their sisters in these images that are up on a gallery wall.
Speaking about her creative process, Shelley explains:
I think that I’m unconscious and conscious at the same time. I’m always thinking about stuff, but in a very subconscious way. So I don’t necessarily say to myself, “How will I do this?” It’s not math to me; it’s something that I’m thinking about and then if I start getting an idea, it starts working itself out once I start on it. It’s not something where I say I’m going to do this and then I’m going to do that. It sort of evolves into a piece. The series This Land is Mime Land evolved from an idea. It was a very simple idea, but then once I started working on it, it just kept growing and growing. If I’m doing a series like Mime Land, I usually shoot five or six shots to the one I’ll use. Sometimes it’s surprising that when I first look at the negatives I don’t think they are going to be very interesting, but when I start re-examining them something starts happening. I guess the creative forces take over and you start to put one image with another.
Shelley Niro, This Land Is Mime Land, 1992, 56 x 94 cm overall, gelatin silver print in hand-drilled overmat, Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography
Niro quotes that I appreciate:
When I started to think about this series of images I wanted it to be an abstract slew of pictures, much like visual poetry, I wanted these images to blend together and form not a literal meaning but give an emotional sensation.
Shelley Niro, Finding Her Helpers, 152.4 x 101.6 cm digital photograph, 2011
If you’re searching for your identity, that sounds kind of hopeless, doesn’t it? It just seems to have a connotation that you’re lost or you’re trying to find your way back to someplace. I think it relates to stereotyping, so instead of accepting what people say you should be, I’m questioning why can’t I be like I am, why can’t I like parts of other things in contemporary society? Regardless of how Indians are viewed, as being very isolated and alienated, we still watch TV, we read the papers, we listen to music. There are many other commonalities with the dominant culture that I probably wouldn’t want to live without and exclude myself from.
I wanted to emphasize Iroquois art and design. I want to emphasize the fact that a culture does not survive by being nasty. It survives out of the will to be creative, and by being creative it boosts the level of thought. It’s not that you want to take over the world. It just happens that you want to create, you want to grow.
When I started looking at Indian art, the majority of the artists were men and they were looking for heroes and warriors. I started thinking about image-making and representation of women. There were very few women artists and the representation of women that they were portraying were pow-wow images. That imagery was fairy tale like. If we as Indian people are trying to destroy the noble warrior image then we must start portraying the world the way we see it and experience it.
I think a lot of times Indian people end up stereotyping themselves. Some people think that to be Indian, you have to do certain things, but I’m just saying that you’re Indian no matter what you do, but you have to decide what you want to do and you have to ask questions, like, am I doing something because it’s expected of me to do, or I am doing it because I really believe this and it’s really a part of me? So I’m always questioning that, saying, “Am I being truthful to myself? How much a part of what I do is part of my psychology?” So I’m always thinking about that.
For additional information and references please see:
The show is magnificent with 2500 artist from around the world. People were waiting in long lines (going around the building) outside the show on opening night. It was in-your-face obvious that the French people are dedicated to their great love of art.
