Painting

Melissa Melero was born in San Francisco, CA in 1974 and spent most of her childhood living near Reno, Nevada. She is a Northern Paiute enrolled with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe located in Fallon, Nevada. Melissa holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Fine Arts from Portland State University, Portland, OR. After spending many years in the southwest and northwest part of the country, Melissa returned to Reno, NV, working part time in arts administration and as a professional artist. She exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, NM and in select galleries throughout the U.S. Her current influences are imagery found in the Nevada landscape, petroglyphs, beadwork, and basketry from the Native tribes of Nevada and California. “I have the constant desire to create these images in my head and in the process these works mesh into organic, caught in time objects of history and personal development.”

http://www.melissamelero.com

Bunky Echo-Hawk is a multi-talented artist whose work spans both media and lifestyle. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, he is a fine artist, graphic designer, photographer, writer and a non-profit professional. Bunky is a traditional singer and dancer of the Pawnee Nation and an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation.

Richard Ray Whitman (born 1949) is a Yuchi-Muscogee Creek multidisciplinary visual artist, poet, and actor. He is enrolled in the Muscogee Creek Nation and lives in Oklahoma.

RICHARD RAY WHITMAN ON INFLUENCES, POLITICS, AND FIRE
I spent some time at Wounded Knee in 1973. That influenced my art and my role as an artist, a culture worker, and a tribal citizen. I had left Santa Fe for Cal Arts and then went to Wounded Knee and never returned to art school. I began to see the artist's role in the context of the struggles at that time, and when I look to Central and South America at the indigenous cultures there, the artist, the poet, the writer, were always in the forefront and part of the larger vision for the people, and, of course, they are the ones who are usually assassinated or who become the political prisoners. I don't see enough artists in North America who are doing the real work that has been assigned them. Rather, the artist seems to do marketable work of safe images to hang on the wall, not work that is engaging and saying something about how it is with us today. So going to Wounded Knee had a very strong impact on my life. It changed my life completely. That experience still sheds light on what I do today.

As far back as I can remember I have always loved art—drawing, painting, making music. What I like most about it is the freedom to create something—anything—from nothing. As a kid I enjoyed watching my uncle who is also an artist painting in his studio. And eventually, I realized that I also had a talent for drawing and that not only could I make a living from it, it also brought me great happiness.

In narrative traditions, to tell the story of tragedy one must always begin by telling the ending first. I once believed that the weight of such expectations functioned as a cultural given for the artist of Native American descent. Its rules stated that we cry for a vision and place ourselves in a single grand narrative of history and representation.

...but the laughter of Coyote saturated and filled our daily lives. It echoed through the lecture halls of histories and it was so powerful and it was so distracting that I forgot my place in linear time and now I work from an untraceable present.