Photography

Bently Spang

Culture:

Primary Medium(s):

"I am interested in sampling from as many mediums and modes of expression as are necessary to express my experience as a living Cheyenne man. I sit squarely in the center of a continuum of making that is countless generations old. Moving forward with my work, I strive to illuminate the contradictions, the injustices and to celebrate the intricacies of a living culture."

IAIA Vision Project Interview by Catherine Mattes
Interview with Tipi Artist Bently Spang
Bently Spang examines culture with humor in Emerson installation
A Time of Visions: Interview by Larry Abbott
Indian 3.0 An art installation by Mary Black Bonnet, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Bently Spang. Shown Nov 2007.

Richard Ray Whitman

Culture:

Primary Medium(s):

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.

William R Wilson

Culture:

Diné (Navajo)

Primary Medium(s):

Photography

Throughout my work I have focused on photographing Navajo People and our relationship to the land. While portraying this relationship I have always been aware of how our representation has never been without consequence. Historically, photography as a scientific means of categorization cannot be made separate from the social, political, economic and ecological colonization of Native North American. Photography has been used to classify and reinforce theories of racial superiority and strengthened anthropological discourse positioning American Indians as primitive others. More commonly, it has been used to reinforce negative stereotypes of Indians, pervasive throughout American culture.

Jolene Rickard

Culture:

Tuskarora

Primary Medium(s):

Photography

Installation

Jolene Rickard is a visual historian, artist, and curator interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She is currently a recipient of a Ford Foundation Research Grant and is conducting research in the Americas, Europe, New Zealand and Australia culminating in a new journal on Indigenous aesthetics, and has a forthcoming book on Visualizing Sovereignty. She served as Interim Chair for the Art Department 2009-2010 and is an affiliated faculty member in the American Indian Program at Cornell University. She is a 2010-2011 recipient of a Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship on the thematic topic of “Global Aesthetics.”

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/histart/rickard.html
http://www.iaia.edu/museum/vision-project/artists/jolene-rickard/
http://museum.cl.msu.edu/museum/tes/sisters/rickard.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2hQgywZ0Jk

Tom Jones

Culture:

Ho-Chunk

Primary Medium(s):

Photography

Tom Jones Born 1964, Charlotte, North Carolina

Tom Jones is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his MFA in Photography and a MA in Museum Studies from Columbia College in Chicago, IL.