Artist(s) of the Week: The Plains Indians

PLAINS INDIAN DRAWINGS

Dead Calvalry Horses

Artist: Red Horse

Tribe: Lakota

1881

"A profound sense of history has long compelled Indian peoples of the Great Plains to chronicle their lives pictorially. As the nineteenth century progressed, the trickle of white explorers and traders across the continent and up the great rivers turned into a veritable flood tide of soldiers and settlers. Their presence changed Plains life irrevocably. Plains Indians adopted a new medium for recording their visual histories, obtained through their contacts with whites: they began to draw in bound ledger books--commonly used for inventory be traders and military officers--using pens, pencils, and watercolors. They also worked in small notebooks and on drawing paper." (Berlo 1996)

Sinte Riding at a Gallop

Artist: Sinte

Tribe: Lakota

1886

Inspection of Indian Prisoners, Fort Marion

Artist: Making Medicine

Tribe: Cheyenne

1876-77

Cheyenne Village Scene: Women's Ceremony with Large Hide

Artist: Red Horse

Tribe: Cheyenne

1876

Pencil, crayon, and ink

8-3/4 x 11-1/4 in.

Top: A Meeting with Three Crows

Middle: A Meeting with Two Crow Men and Two Women

Bottom: A Meeting with Three Crows

Artist: Unknown

Tribe: Cheyenne

1890s

Watercolor, crayon, and pencil

7-15/16 x 12-1/2 in. each

Troops Assembled Against a Cheyenne Village

Artist: Bear's Heart

Tribe: Cheyenne

1876-77

Rescue of a Comrade Under Heavy Fire

Artist: Unknown

Tribe: Arapaho

1878-81

Pencil and colored pencil

7-3/4 x 12-1/4 in.

Wicoun Pinkte Maka Kin Ta Wicokunze Oyake Pelo

(They Said Treaties Shall Be The Law of the Land)

Artist: Francis Yellow

Tribe: Lakota

1995

Ink on antique map

27-1/2 x 17-1/4 in.

"Plains Indian drawings tell many stories. But writings about these drawings have focused too much on one set of questions, based on European models: Who is the artist? Who is depicted? What are the identifying details of the narrative? These drawings have seldom been treated as complex works of art rather than simple historical or ethnographic documents (Lessard 1992). Yet the unraveling of ethnographic details is only one narrative thread in a complexly woven story. We sadly underestimate the evocative power of these works if we unwind only that thread. To most art historians and Native scholars in the 1990s, what is of greater interest are the subtleties of interpretation involving social, religious, and economic history and artistic biography, which reveal each work as an individual creative phenomenon within a complex social nexus." (Berlo 1996)

In Berlo, J.C. (Ed.) 1996. Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935: Pages From a Visual History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers.

Artist of the Week: Ingrid Calame

INGRID CALAME

1965 Born Bronx, New York

Currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Education

1996 MFA Art and Film, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

1995 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME

1987 BFA, State University of New York at Purchase, Purchase, NY

1986 Junior Semester Abroad, Tyler School of Art in Rome, Rome, Italy

1985 Junior Semester Abroad, State University of New York College at Buffalo in Siena, Siena, Italy

(Article from The Guardian)

Artist Ingrid Calame on how she draws

Since the early 90s, I have been working with tracing. I go to specific locations to trace marks, stains and cracks on the ground on to architectural Mylar [polyester-based tracing film]. From these tracings I make drawings and paintings. I clean the original tracings and layer them on top of each other. Once I've piled up the tracings, I place several rectangles of drafting Mylar on top of them. This determines the size of the drawings I will eventually make. I then start to trace the layers of rubbings that are beneath the rectangles, with a different colour pencil for each layer, peeling back the layers one by one until I reach the bottom of the pile. The final drawings are always a surprise.

I was recently invited to do a residency at the Albright-Knox art gallery in Buffalo, New York. I traced for three weeks with nine assistants, for five days a week. We took tracings from a storage hall at the Arcelor Mittal steel plant, from a wading pool, a parking lot ... This working process is important - going out into the world.

My journey through tracing different sites, working with and meeting people and seeing their reactions to the work - all this has changed my understanding of representation and abstraction.

Playing Cards

SOME GUIDELINES

(refer to MT project sheet for details)

Orientation

• Tall/Portrait
• Reversible (no "right-side-up") May be read both ways...

Here are some examples. All four are done differently. Is there a relationship between the top and bottom half? What are some symbols? What role do they play within the image? Is there a story being told? What is it?

This is an example of a card that can be read both ways, but doesn't seem like there's a top or bottom. It looks like one whole image either way you position it. This is another example of you you can compose your card.

IN CONCLUSION:

There is a wide span of how you can compose your reversible card image. At one end could be an integrated mirror image, at the other end, something like the card shown above, and anything else in between.

And remember to let symbols and patterns/textures aid you in composition and telling your story.

Here is the link to the large sets of playing cards shown in class:

Playing Cards

Shirley & Buddy

Artist(s) of the Week: The Royal Art Lodge

The Royal Art Lodge. The name itself conjures images of secret ritual practices, exclusive membership, brave stands taken against the elements. But this is not your father's lodge, nor even your father's art lodge. A collaborative of eight young, wildly inventive, modestly self-effacing Canadian artists--

Marcel Dzama

Neil Farber

Drue Langlois

Myles Langlois

Jonathan Pylypchuk

Adrian Williams

--The Royal Art Lodge enjoys a far-ranging and free-wheeling practice, producing everything from works on paper to film, video, musical performances, and puppets, with drawing, that most personal and immediate of art forms, providing the link between the various products of their whimsey.

The Royal Art Lodge: Studio shots

Text reads: "amplified yelps: 200 watts."

Text reads "EAT THE BUNNY > Lucky Number=5"

Text reads: "ALONE"

LINKS: The Royal Art Lodge Website

Marcel Dzama, a hero of The Royal Art Lodge, discusses his own personal direction and projects he is working on in New York.

Gallery Director, Cameron Shaw discusses Marcel Dzama's exhibition, "Even the Ghost of the Past" at David Zwirner Gallery in New York.

Animation/Video/Music Video

Featuring the drawings of Marcel Dzama

Drawing Mutability

In an effort to launch the winter quarter, the 1103 classes engaged in an experiment that was highly public, extremely collaborative, and as they discovered, constantly unpredictable, shifting, inconstant…mutable.

Be sure to play "Tale of Brave Ulysses" by Cream as you view the documentation photos (see below).

DAY 1:

T/Th class begin the Experiment

Day 2:

M/W Class continue experiment (end of class)

Day 3:

T/Th Class continue experiment (end of class/end of experiment)

Detail

Detail

Detail

"TALE OF BRAVE ULYSSES" by Cream

Play> as audio backdrop for images...

"Nought may endure but mutability"

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

"All things are always changing...

All things are fluent; every image forms

Wandering through change."

--Ovid

Artist of the Week: Ernesto Caivano

ERNESTO CAIVANO

Born
b. 1972 Madrid, Spain--Lives and works in New York City

Education
2001 MFA Columbia University

1999 BFA The Cooper Union

Caivano, as with most artists has explored a number of different themes within his work. One body of work in particular comes from concepts, inspirations, departure points that is unique, strange, and unexpected. Critics describe his work in a narrative framework using literary language to describe it. It has been observed to be "in line with the slippery divide between abstraction and representation (or legibility and obscurity)."

The New York based artist here shows the process of telling an ongoing epic story. These drawings tell an ongoing epic story. They are visualizations of excerpts from After the Woods,"a fantastical tale written by the artist that involves a man and woman, separated for a millennium, who attempt to reunite in an unspecified post-apocalyptic future. During their time apart, he has become a knight with the power to aid the evolutionary development of plants and she a spaceship who symbolizes (and fosters advances in technology. Caivano's protagonists consistently encounter exotic creatures throughout their journey, and even transmit messages written written on the wings of birds the artist calls "Philapores," who, incapable of normal flight, travel through dust, water, and other matter." (Brian Sholis)

His work is informed by:

Albrecht Durer (prints and drawings)

William Blake (Romantic visions)

Early Modern explorations of abstraction

Fractal geometry

Contemporary telecommunications technology

Advanced scientific inquiry

Fables and fairy tales of medieval literature

etc...