The Contemporary Native Arts Scene

Sunbeams sliced through massive windows as Lloyd Oxendine looked across Riverside Park toward the mighty Hudson River. Oxendine was sitting at his dining room table on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, taking sips of organic chicken soup and sweetened ice tea. His menagerie of brilliantly colored parrots squawked excitedly in their cages.

“The parrots eat what we eat,” said Oxendine. “They like cooked meat with spices, and vegetarian food. Bird [an appropriately named 38-year-old Amazonian green parrot] eats ice cream from a spoon.”

Oxendine is both a painter and an academic who holds an MFA in art history from Columbia University.  He founded and operated the first gallery of American Indian art in NYC, “American Art” (1971-1976), and during that period curated many prestigious shows from such visionary indigenous artists as R. C. Gorman, George Morrison and Frank La Pena. Oxendine then spent a decade in Europe and San Francisco, where he achieved considerable success as a painter. In 1985 he returned to the art mecca that is New York to direct the American Indian Community House’s (AICH) gallery.

According to Diane Fraher, director of the New York-based American Indian arts organization Amerinda, Oxendine’s work at the galleries was instrumental in helping solidify the indigenous art scene on the East Coast. “It established that our folks were here and doing things, and that people were interested,” said Fraher.

Today, Amerinda works to build awareness of American Indian artists and provides financial and other support to creative people. The organization’s popular web and newsletter-based roster includes artists in many disciplines, from sculpture to painting and mixed media, as well as actors, models, journalists, historians, musicians and others. “We try to apply traditional values of native culture, which are to support one another, work by consensus, and establish a clear-cut identity that can be identified as indigenous,” Fraher explained.

“People don’t understand contemporary Native American art because they haven’t been exposed to it,” said Tom Haukaas, an American Indian painter from Florida who was exhibiting at the NMAI’s holiday arts market in downtown Manhattan. “Much of my work as an artist is in consumer education.” Haukaas displayed watercolor paper that was emblazoned with striking, bright interlocking horse designs. He said the work was made of earth pigments and included sacred designs.

Nadema Agard, a mixed media artist, writer, curator and educator based in northern Manhattan, said in a phone interview, “I don’t want to be pigeonholed. My work stands up to any kind of art around the world.” Agard, who is of Cherokee, Lakota and Powhatan heritage, also consults through her firm Red Earth Studio. She added,  “I do take pride in the fact that the reason why I make art has a lot to do with my roots as a native person, but it does not have to be defined as ‘native art.’” Agard did a one-woman show in New York a few years ago with cross-cultural themes, including Hawaiian, Polynesian, Greco-Roman and Australian Aboriginal influence. “I love all those worlds, and have spent time in them,” she explained.

“I’ve had people selecting art for native shows reject my work because they thought it didn’t look native enough,” said Athena LaTocha, a Lakota/Ojibwe painter who splits her time between Brooklyn and Stony Brook, Long Island, where she is studying for an MFA. “Who is this person who thinks this is what native art is supposed to be? What about the work of George Morrison [the now-deceased Ojibwa landscape painter, sculptor and abstract expressionist]?” LaTocha added, “To me, if you are just having a show with other American Indian artists, it is like having an art ghetto.”

Oxendine believes the status of American Indian artists in the city hasn’t changed that much, in terms of mainstream respect and acceptance, since the 1970s. However, he does admit that there may be more contemporary indigenous artists than ever, and that the AICH and Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian do provide some outlets for showcasing work.

In addition to dynamic artists like Agard and LaTocha, other local artistic luminaries include Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw), whose paintings and installations are vibrantly colorful and ultra-contemporary, and Alan Michelson (Mohawk), whose paintings explore absent American Indians in the city.

“We’re all very complicated beings. The only thing other native artists may have in common with me is they are also American Indian,” said Agard.